African Trio

Cinema cycles usually begin when some foresighted or lucky producer scores a bull's-eye with a shot in the dark. They usually last until there is no room left on the target. Last week there was a volley of shots-in-the-dark when three major moviemakers simultaneously fired away at the same place, released big-budget pictures chronicling the doings of the white man in Africa. Two bull's-eyes and one clean miss, last week's African broadside practically amounted to a cinema cycle in itself.

Bull's-eye No. 1 was Stanley and Livingstone (Twentieth Century-Fox), a $2,200,000 version of what the New York Herald's James Gordon Bennett Jr. regarded as the greatest news story of all time: the search for vanished British Missionary David Livingstone by the Floyd Gibbons of his age, Mr. Bennett's Henry Morton Stanley. To make the film, Producer Darryl Zanuck sent Mrs. Osa Johnson and a crew of technicians and extras to Africa for six months, had them assemble an authentic, awe-inspiring record of a savage country and people that would have scared Tarzan out of his breechclout. Back in Hollywood, Zanuck turned his album over to his ablest associate producer, Kenneth Macgowan, his ace action director, Henry King (In Old Chicago), gave them a foolproof cast headed by M.G.M.'s Academy-Awarded Spencer Tracy.

To improve on the world's greatest news story, the Zanuck version* equips Newshawk Stanley with a girl, Eve Kingsley (Nancy Kelly), who loves young Gareth Tyce (Richard Green), who, by coincidence, is the son of Publisher Bennett's mortal rival, Lord Tyce (Charles Coburn). But what makes Stanley and Livingstone justify the Bennett and Zanuck faith in it is Stanley's long, forlorn safari over a landscape of unearthly birds, noises and people, the last happy chance that brings him face to face with Dr. Livingstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke). Actor Tracy does not scamp his historic line. Then, in a scene of muted emotional power, Stanley learns that old Dr. Livingstone, whom the world believes to be either dead or the hostage of some savage tribe, is happily busy with God's work, adamant against any attempt to "rescue" him.

When Stanley leaves, his newsbeat has been turned into a crusade, a war not on ignorant bushmen but on learned incredulity. M.G.M.'s wisdom in lending Actor Tracy for his part appears when he delivers, to the jeering Royal Society of Geographers, a four-minute speech that is not only one of the longest but perhaps the most eloquent in cinema history, sounds as if it might be worth a trophy case of Academy Oscars. Excellent shots: Stanley foiling a host of murderous native warriors with a brush fire; Dr. Livingstone gaily leading his jungle Sunday school in a rendition of Onward, Christian Soldiers.

A British bull's-eye is Four Feathers (United Artists-Alexander Korda), memorializing one of the most bullish turns British imperialism ever took: the gaudy slaughter at Omdurman with which Horatio Herbert Kitchener in 1898 avenged the massacre of General Gordon and the British garrison at Khartum, 13 years before. For Four Feathers Hungarian Alexander Korda, the Union Jack's most industrious cinematic flagwaver, sent his director-brother, Zoltan, and practically his entire cast to the Sudan, where they stumbled over some of the actual shells Kitchener had left behind, tottered in temperatures of 120DEG in the breeze. Able Actor Ralph Richardson, who suffers a sunstroke in the film, never mimed more realistically.

Story of Four Feathers, from a Kiplingesque novel by A. E. W. Mason, concerns a young British officer who leaves his regiment on the eve of active duty, gets white feathers from his three old messmates and a fourth from his disillusioned fiancee, and then goes through hell & hot water to give them back. Although this fable is energetically enacted, Four Feathers is most memorable for its desert and battle scenes, dyed in the renowned Korda Technicolor. John Bullish characterization: Commander of the British Empire Charles Aubrey Smith, as an ancient fire-eater whose hobby is re-enacting his version of the battle of Balaclava with fruit and cutlery at the dinner table.

Beau Geste (Paramount), an attempt to give voice to Herbert Brenon's 1926 silent classic of the French Foreign Legion, follows its original so relentlessly that it resembles nothing so much as a talking mummy. Archeologists will recognize scene for scene the progress of the Geste brothers from happy Brandon Abbas to unhappy Morocco, while younger cinemaddicts are following less than breathlessly the mystery over who stole that sapphire of sapphires, the Blue Water. Both will be apt to find the fraternal devotion of the Gestes rather mawkish, Actor Gary Cooper something short of the Beau ideal. Although the desert suspense of the film's opening at desolate Fort Zinderneuf and the starkness of the dead men propped up in the embrasures (both copied take for take from the 1926 picture) are still slick, and Actor Brian Donlevy outvillains his predecessor Noah Beery, Beau Geste illustrates the truth that, in recapturing some of the virtues of their original, remakes usually develop vices all their own.

* For a definitive version, see Stanley's How I Found Livingstone.

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