The New Pictures

Ramona (Twentieth Century-Fox). The cinema's recent investigation of the U. S. past including to date The Gorgeous Hussy, Robin Hood of Eldorado, Hearts Divided, The Plainsman, The Texas Rangers, Last of the Mohicans and Daniel Boone (see col. 3), now broadens to include Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson's quiet classic about a ranch-girl's love-life in the San Jacinto mountains, circa 1870. Ramona herself is half-historical, half-fictional, half-white and half-Indian, but there is nothing halfway in the manner in which Twentieth Century-Fox has handled her biography. It has used the simple framework as a bitter disquisition on the traditional white methods of dealing with Indians, civilized or raw. In addition, the cinemagoer gets a memorable love story, a handsome technicolor picture gallery of California's southern highlands.

Ramona (Loretta Young) did not know about her Indian blood. Senora Moreno (Pauline Frederick) in whose house she lived, had brought her up like a white girl and she was loved by the Senora's son Phillipe (Kent Taylor). However, she was glad when she found out that her father's wife had been a squaw because it left her free to marry Alesandro (Don Ameche, late of NBC's Grand Hotel hour). They had a happy life until white usurpers put them oft the land they farmed. Trekking in the rain to new lands, their baby be came ill. Alesandro stole a horse to fetch the medicine that might save his daughter. Tracked down and killed by the horse's owner, he left Ramona to dubious happiness with Phillipe.

The attempt to froth a happy ending over Ramona's widow-weeds is not a major flaw. The picture is so pictorially arresting it might almost do without a story. Dark cottonwoods and yellow wheat, the greens and reds and rolling con-tours of the San Jacinto mountains where it was filmed, spread themselves out for the technicolor camera like a war-chief's blanket. Historically accurate since there has been little change in the landscape since 1870, Ramona pours its eye-filling opulence through many frames: Ramona's wedding breakfast, the horse race at the Fiesta, Alesandro driving his sheep to San Diego, ploughing in the sun, racing a Palomino pony through a field of wheat.

Daniel Boone (RKO), the week's second item of Americana, was originally produced as a George O'Brien Western. It turned out better, partly because it is a relatively faithful adaptation of history, partly because Cinemactor O'Brien's chesty musculature fits perfectly the aver age conception of famed Long Hunter Boone, a middle-sized man who, wrote Audubon, "appeared gigantic."

As in Ramona (see above) the villains are land-grabbers. This time they are silk-breeched Colonial Virginians who legislate an act appropriating the Kentucky land which the great Boone appropriated from the Indians. With 40 families at his buck skin back, Boone treks over the Cumberlands, founds the village of Boonesborough. The land is as fertile as the Red skins are hostile. Stout Boone protects the settlers in many a brush with Indians, kills more than one warrior, narrowly misses death a dozen times, is once captured by Shawnees, escaping in time to render great service to beleaguered Boonesborough. This is the best sequence in the picture. On fire after a nine-day siege by Indians and renegade whites, Boone's stockade is saved by a heavy rain--a deed of Providence so terrifying to the superstitious braves that they quit fighting. When the Virginia knaves have stolen with a legal writ the acres that defied the tomahawk, Boone and his men, Kentuckians now, turn to the trail again, westward into a waiting continent.

Pleased with Daniel Boone, Producer George A. Hirliman commissioned Screenwriter Edgecumb Pinchon to write two more scenarios based on school-book lore: one with Sam Houston as hero, one with Davy Crockett.

La Kermesse Heroique (Tobis). When a Spanish messenger gallops into the Flemish town of Boom one morning in 1616 to announce that the Duke of Olivares and his battalion plan to spend the night there, the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen are scared out of their wits. Foreseeing a repetition of the bloody invasion of Antwerp, the Mayor suggests a ruse: he will pretend to be dead and the Aldermen, mourning at his bier, will be spared the necessity of resisting the intruders. When the Spaniards arrive, the men of Boom--except a young painter named Peter Breughel, in love with the Mayor's daughter--are nowhere in sight, but Boom's ladies, disgusted with their chicken-hearted husbands, are waiting outside the gates. They present their guests with the key to the city, and that night, while the Mayor writhes in impotent fury, the Duke, his hungry friar, his lecherous little dwarf and all his soldiers are royally entertained. Next morning, the strangers troop away across the plains and Boom's burghers come out to face their wives. The Mayor's wife makes a generous speech giving him the credit for saving the town from the horrors of a siege. He notices around her neck a magnificent new string of pearls.

Directed by Jacques Feyder, who will make Marlene Dietrich's forthcoming Knight Without: Armor for Alexander Korda,La Kermesse Heroique explodes the theory that Rene Clair has a monopoly on urbane comedy in the French cinema. It is as sly a farce as any that has ever led a U. S. censor board to mistake good manners for innocent intentions. Produced at a cost of $850,000--fabulous for a French cinema--and magnificently set by Lazare Meerson, it was distinguished abroad by winning the grand Prix du Cinema Franc,ais, being banned in England and Holland. Released as Carnival In Flanders, with English subtitles to explain its French dialog, it last week served as the opening attraction at Manhattan's new Filmarte Theatre, the city's fifth cinemansion dedicated to a policy of showing "outstanding foreign films."

Old Hutch (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Cinemaddicts who have felt that Wallace Beery's specialty of pawing at his chest, wrinkling his forehead, scuffing his toes and wiping his rubbery face with the palm of his hand, received too little footage in his previous pictures should be delighted by Old Hutch. It contains practically nothing else. Adapted by George Kelly from a Garret Smith story unearthed from the Saturday Evening Post files for February 1920, it shows what happens to a smalltown ne'er-do-well when he comes on a robber's cache of $100,000. Climax of his subsequent regeneration arrives, as anticipated, when the $100,000 disappears.

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