The New Pictures

Shane (Paramount) is as high-styled a Technicolored horse opera as moviegoers are likely to see this year. It tells the familiar old western yarn about the good guy v. the badmen. The mysterious stranger named Shane (Alan Ladd) befriends a couple of turn-of-the-century Wyoming homesteaders (Van Heflin and Jean Arthur) and their nine-year-old son (Brandon de Wilde). Having helped the "sodbusters" fight off a group of villainous cattlemen who are trying to grab their land, Shane just as mysteriously rides off into the blue distance.

This conventional screenplay has been filmed in entirely unconventional style by Producer-Director George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens. One of Hollywood's most painstaking craftsmen, Stevens for the first time has turned his individualistic director's talents to a western--and with striking results. From the opening shot in which buckskin-clad Shane, a sort of blond Apollo of the plains, rides into view on a roan horse, the film is marked by the kind of distinctive, richly detailed picture-making that is scarcely ever lavished on the most high-toned movie drama, let alone a western.

Filmed largely around Jackson Hole, Wyo., Shane bulges with authentic sights & sounds. As the yarn plunges forward scene after scene hints at the pleasures and hardships of frontier life: homesteaders dancing and setting off homemade explosives at a July 4 party; bloody fistfighting in a saloon; little girls solemnly watching a sow with her sucklings; the ring of hand axes against a stump; tumbleweed brushing the legs of jittery horses; a harmonica solo of taps as a pine coffin is lowered into a hilltop grave Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.

Van Heflin as the hard-working homesteader, Jean Arthur as his wife and Brandon de Wilde as their young son who idolizes Shane, make the most of their roles. As hard-riding, straight-shooting Shane, Alan Ladd is the personification of 11 strong silent western heroes. He is larger than life, more heroic than legend, the kind of man who is feared by men and loved by women, children and dogs. But he is not the sort to take advantage of the affections of a faithful wife and a small boy. As Brandon de Wilde gazes adoringly after him, he mounts his horse and is on his way. Beyond the jagged mountains, there are other wrongs to be righted

The way Director Stevens has put it together, Shane adds up to something more than the sum of its individual parts, it almost rises above its stock material to become a sort of celluloid symphony of six-shooters and the wide open spaces.

Producer-Director George Cooper Stevens, 48, is a perfectionist who came up an odd way: at 19, he was the youngest cameraman in Hollywood, and his specialty was comedy (including 60 or more Laurel & Hardy and Harry Langdon shorts). Hal Roach made him a director (of shorts) in 1929, and Stevens moved on into feature-length pictures merely by stretching out his two-reelers. His first big hit was Alice Adams (1935)., followed by such topnotchers as Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town, A Place in the Sun, Something to Live For.

A stubborn seeker after realism Stevens relies heavily on a "reflective technique," i.e., an actor's reaction to a line or situation. At times he resorts to trickery to get the proper reaction. On Shane one old standby worked perfectly with Villain Jack Palance, who seemed unable to turn on the right expression of amused contempt in one scene. Actor Elisha Cook Jr. had an angry line: "You're a no-good, lying Yankee!" Palance's facial expression earned too much contempt and not enough amusement. Finally, Stevens took Cook aside for a whispered moment. When the camera turned again, Cook read his line: "You're a no-good, lying Yankee--and a sonofabitch too!" Stevens got his take, and the extra epithet was merely cut out of the sound track later. At other imes, Stevens is willing to sacrifice realism for graceful movement. As an ex-cameraman, he knows that a man getting off a horse looks better than a man mounting one; thus, he has been known to shoot his actor dismounting and then reverse the motion of the film.

For a man who has just brought in such a sure-fire moneymaker as Shane (cost of the picture: $3,100,000), Stevens last week found himself, by a curious Hollywood paradox, without a job. Shane was his last picture for Paramount, which like most companies, likes to have more say in a project than Stevens is willing to permit. I don't think [big companies] see a motion picture for what it's worth. They see it only in terms of product . . . They don't consider what an attraction can be or should be [but] keep looking for assurances of having seen it before. That alone eliminates the possibility of a picture being interesting." Stevens plans to "go ahead and make another picture that suits my standards . . . When, how and where, I don't know ... I'm taking my time now . . . When l Iook at Cecil B. DeMilIe (71), I realize you shouldn't even start to think of yourself as on top of your game till you're his age. I expect to be in pictures a long time."

By the Light of the Silvery Moon (Warner) has a couple of pleasant young people, Doris Day and Gordon MacRae singing a number of pleasant old songs, e.g. If You Were the Only Girl, My Home Town Is a One-Horse Town --but Its Big Enough for Me, and the title tune. Unfortunately, there is also a screenplay. Too vaguely based on Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories, the picture unreels some foolishly romantic complications in a small Indiana town at the threshold of the Jazz Age. Among those present: a stuffy paterfamilias (Leon Ames), an understanding mother (Rosemary DeCamp), a comic maid (Mary Wickes), an unruly youngster (Billy Gray), a pet turkey named Gregory. With its sleighrides, ice-skating parties and other Technicolored bucolics, By the Light of the Silvery Moon is so relentlessly wholesome that moviegoers may wish for the Dead End kids to drop in.

Small Town Girl (MGM) is a Technicolored trifle about a playboy (Farley Granger) who is jailed for speeding through a small town. By Hollywood justice, he finds himself not only in the clutches of the law but also in the arms of the judge's pretty daughter (Jane Powell). She smuggles fried chicken and mince pie into his cell, regales him by singing Small Towns Are Smile Towns, and sneaks him out of jail for a night on New York town. This does not please the playboy's fiancee, Dancing Star Ann Miller. By the fadeout the playboy's 30-day jail sentence has been commuted, and he has the judge's daughter for life. The movie's most striking feature: a dance routine in which leggy Ann Miller taps her way among a disembodied orchestra surrealistically imbedded in a musicomedy stage.

Off Limits (Paramount) casts durable Funnyman Bob Hope as a prizefight manager turned military policeman. Hope tangles with a frozen-faced sergeant (Eddie Mayehoff) and an apoplectic general, gets seasick watching his protege, MP Mickey Rooney, box on board a battleship, masterminds a championship fight via walkie-talkie and falls for Rooney's beautiful aunt (Marilyn Maxwell), easily the best-looking aunt of the year. Making brief personal appearances in the picture: Bing Crosby, Jack Dempsey, ex-Footballer Tom Harmon. The result, though no main movie event, is a fairly entertaining, lightweight preliminary.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.