The New Pictures

Arizona (Columbia), not to be confused with California, Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nevada, Wyoming or Little Old New York, is a remnant of pre-War Hollywood economy when a $2,000,000 budget was as commonplace an item in a producer's checkbook as a mink coat for the wife. Needing a fancy jewel to decorate its year's offerings, Columbia allotted it $1,500,000. Producer-Director Ruggles hiked his company off to a location near Tucson, battled weather, dust and sickness last summer until his costs had mounted to $2,250,000. Rival studios, shaving the bumps off their budgets, are now anxiously eying its reception.

Arizona has all the symptoms of a spectacle. The prelude, in which the camera follows a long caravan across the mountains into the dirty, becrusted little town of Tucson, is filled with all the miscellany which Hollywood attaches to a scene to make it Big. The Tucson of 1860 is painstakingly reproduced to the smallest adobe-brick hut; the streets are crawling with extras, packed with props. Before the end there appear at one time or another 600 head of Hereford cattle, 485 horses, 1,200 ("thousands of") extras, 150 rippling, bare-skinned Papago Indians.

Yet for all his prodigality, Director Ruggles avoided the temptation to let his camera linger longingly on this impressive and costly background. He hewed to the narrative of pretty Phoebe Titus (Tomboy Jean Arthur), the only white woman in Tucson, who earns herself a pretty penny selling pies for $1 apiece, then goes into the freighting business. The gentleman with whom she later contracts Arizona's first all-white marriage is genial, peripatetic Peter Muncie (William Holden), a slim and smiling young pioneer who rides into Tucson with other settlers and passes some fond words with Phoebe before setting out for California to join the Union Army.

For the Threat there are Jefferson Carteret and Lazarus Ward (Warren William and Porter Hall), a pair of sleazy scoundrels characterized by such lines as: "If Muncie doesn't get back to Arizona with the cattle, we'll take over Phoebe's freighting business and land. (Pause.) If he does, there'll be an Indian attack just before he reaches Tucson--and we'll still own everything the lady has."

The birth pangs of Arizona are merely background for the scufflings of these representatives of good & evil as they wind their way through Indian fights, cattle rustling, military occupation by both Confederate and Union troops. Like any horse opera, big or small, the picture provides more gunplay than the Aberdeen, Md. Proving Ground.

The full canvas is as honest and acceptable a piece of western folklore as the cinema cameras have yet recorded. The topic has been so thoroughly covered from quickies on poverty row to DeMillian extravaganzas, so adroitly burlesqued in recent films like Rangers of Fortune and The Westerner, that otherwise good melodrama may seem to sophisticates slightly corny. But it is ripe, tasty corn.

A Night at Earl Carroll's (Paramount) concerns operations at Showman Earl Carroll's pale green "theatre restaurant" on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard. There is unconsciously aimless comedy by Ken Murray and others, and the Earl Carroll chorus girls strut stiffly about the stage in irrelevant maneuvers involving immense fans and Christmas-tree headgear.

Apparently nervous over the fact that Carroll's balding head, which gives him the look of a village deacon, might detract from the glamor to be associated with a dashing entrepreneur of naked floor shows, Paramount suggested that Carroll wear a wig in the picture. Carroll refused, explained: "A bald-headed boulevardier has more appeal for women than any clumsy youngster, no matter how well covered is his scalp."

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