The New Pictures

Never a Dull Moment (RKO Radio) tries to hatch another Egg and I, merely lays an egg. The picture marries off a fashionable Broadway songwriter (Irene Dunne) to a rodeo cowboy (Fred MacMurray) and plunges her into the soul-testing pratfalls of housekeeping on his ramshackle ranch.

MacMurray's homestead is equipped with props out of the Coney Island fun house: loose floorboard, collapsing bed, backfiring stove and a small gale that hits at the worst possible time. Heroine Dunne must also cope with livestock and servant problems, gossipy neighbors, a spoilsport (William Demarest) who controls the water supply, and the delicate affections of her husband's two daughters by another marriage.

The story of the city girl's triumph makes as wholesome a batch of cornmeal mush as Hollywood has cooked up all year. Though some of the slapstick enlivens a few moments, Never a Dull Moment gives a moviegoer plenty of time to wonder why well-to-do Songwriter Dunne doesn't plow her royalties into the ranch and save everyone a lot of bother.

The West Point Story (Warner) crossbreeds two thin Hollywood strains: the backstage musical and the plot that glorifies the U.S. Military Academy. The result is a little monster of a flag-waving, hip-wagging movie combining the misshapen features of both. In a fine burst of freakishness, the Warners have even stuffed overage (46) James Cagney into the uniform of a West Point plebe.

Though Cagney settles down at the Academy as comfortably as if he were in stir, it takes some feverish scripting to get him there. A down-at-heel Broadway genius, he is hired by a producer ostensibly to stage the cadet corps' annual show, actually to lure the producer's singing nephew (Gordon MacRae) from an Army career to show business. Brass-baiting ex-G.I. Cagney rags the cadets so energetically that the corps makes him a plebe for a while to keep him on a leash--and, of course, to teach him to love West Point the hard way. From there on, the film drags in Flirtation Walk, the honor system, the show-must-go-on, a pretentious cantata celebrating the Academy and such production-number props as the U.S. flag. Through it all, breathing hard and never able to obey the cadets' admonitions to "suck in that gut," Cagney struts, mugs and rampages with the embarrassing insistence of a pugnacious drunk whom no one quite dares to lead to the door. For its best moments, The West Point Story depends on talented Dancer Gene Nelson and the pleasant voices of Gordon MacRae and Doris Day in some tuneful Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn songs. As Cagney's girl friend, who all but joins the corps herself, Virginia Mayo fills her tights admirably.

Copper Canyon (Paramount) is a milestone of mediocrity in Hollywood's current stampede to make Technicolored westerns pegged on the Civil War (see below). Neither good, bad nor indifferent to any standard device of horse opera, the picture makes a feeble stab at novelty by casting Hedy Lamarr and Ray Milland-- both with the wrong accents--as a saloon queen and a Confederate ex-colonel.

Milland turns up as a vaudeville trick-shot artist in a post-bellum copper-mining town where Villain MacDonald Carey is whipping up anti-Confederate feeling for crass economic reasons. The ex-colonel rallies the underprivileged Southerners, converts Adventuress Lamarr to righteousness and does his bit to bind the nation's wounds by quoting Lincoln on "malice toward none." What is especially depressing about Copper Canyon is not so much its dreary reprise of movies best forgotten as its dreary portent of movies still to come.

The Civil War western was probably inevitable. The sustained box-office appeal of such Civil War epics as The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind is part of Hollywood's folklore. Westerns, popular since early silent days, are still steady moneymakers. The latest trend was forecast last spring by MGM's The Outriders, in which Confederate Joel McCrea escaped from a Yankee prison camp, took to bushwhacking over broad stretches of western scenery. Then came 20th Century-Fox's Two Flags West (Confederate prisoners of war sign up to fight Indians), Warner's Rocky Mountain (Errol Flynn tries to win the West for the South). Now in prospect are a dozen or so other films in which Civil War soldiers, guerrillas or ex-soldiers wind up one way or another between St. Louis and San Francisco.

Confederate Freebooter William Clarke Quantrill will raid again--and again & again--in Kansas Raiders (Universal-International), The Great Missouri Raid (Nat Holt), Quantrill's Raiders (Paramount). Confederate veterans are .due to turn up in the postbellum Wild West as, among other things, bandits (RKO's Best of the Bad Men) and railroad builders (Columbia's Santa Fe). In Nat Holt's Warpath, the formula gets a bold switch: a Civil War veteran (Edmond O'Brien) goes west, all right, but he's a Yankee.

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