The New Picture

Wells Fargo (Paramount), like The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, The Forty-Niners, but refreshed by a newer technique, attempts to show the winning of the West, with pioneering Expressmen Henrv Wells and William Fargo in the van.

Its ten episodes (each announced by old-fashioned subtitles) parade across the screen the high lights of 26 years (1844-1870) : the panting enthusiasm of the gold rush, mushrooming San Francisco, the lickety-split pony express, the careening overland stages, the Civil War's venomous fratricide, Reconstruction's remorseful hangover.

To exploit to the limit each of these climactic events was easier for Director Frank Lloyd and his cinemauthor associate, Howard Estabrook, than to relate them coherently and plausibly in a film of less than two hours' duration. Too experienced a craftsman to suspend the full weight of so freighted a period on romance's slender cord. Director Lloyd makes a valiant try at hooking up Wells & Fargo with everything in sight, from notorious Lola Montez to Lincoln's second inaugural address.

As the loyal Wells Fargo hero, Joel McCrea does his facile best to cement together these episodic bricks. In the love scenes he has no trouble putting heart into it, since in real life Frances Dee is Mrs. Joel McCrea. In general Wells Fargo is ably cast, and the production & settings are convincingly accurate. Most plausible period scene: gangling Bob Burns, as an ingratiating Leatherstocking of the plains, conversing endlessly with his laconic Indian companion, Pawnee, whose total vocabulary is "ugh!"

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