The New Pictures

Westward the Women (MGM) is the showmanlike saga of an 1851 trek halfway across the U.S. by 140 women, recruited to marry the lovelorn settlers of a California valley. Rancher John McIntire signs up the prospective wives for his men, lets them pick their mates from a bulletin board full of daguerreotypes. Then hard-bitten Scout Robert Taylor rides herd on the ladies on the dangerous wagon-trail to the West.

Before the trip's survivors finally become mail-order brides in a scene of titillating comic hokum, they endure an exhaustive series of acts of God, man and MGM: storms, accidents, Indian attacks, childbirth, rape, dissension, the rigors of the Rockies and the heat of Death Valley. The passengers themselves are just as varied e.g., a French girl (Denise Dareel), who puts a respectable front on a disreputable past; a salty New Englander (Hope Emerson), who spouts seafaring lingo; a frail, pregnant schoolteacher (Beverly Dennis); a muleskinning crack shot (Lenore Lonergan); an Italian immigrant (Renata Vanni) with a nine-year-old boy. In the tradition of Frank Capra, who supplied the story for Scripter Charles Schnee, Westward the Women deploys its ample stock company and wealth of incident in a highly artificial pattern designed for a maximum of humor, pathos, action and romance. The result carries little conviction, either historical or human, but it makes a slick piece of entertainment.

Rashomon* (Daiei; RKO Radio), the first Japanese film to reach Manhattan in 14 years, is an interesting cinematic curiosity, quite unlike anything produced in the West. The judges at the 1951 Venice Film Festival gave it their grand prize, and other moviegoers may also be impressed by its expert photography, fluent direction and scorching insight--in terms of peculiarly Oriental flavor--into the frailty of the human animal the world over.

A strange film even by the standards of Japan (where it drew only enough business to meet its cost of $140,000), Rashomon opens in a ruined 8th century temple, where a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest, taking shelter from a lashing rain, ponder a bewildering crime that has shaken their faith in men. As they recount the crime to a cynical passerby, flashbacks picture the testimony at the trial and four differing re-enactments of the violent incident itself.

Up to a point, the facts are undisputed: a bandit has stalked a traveling samurai and his wife through the forest, decoyed the husband, trussed him up and raped the wife in his presence. Coming on the scene afterward, the woodcutter has found the samurai dead, his goods stolen.

But how and why did the husband die? In turn, the movie gives the dramatized explanations of the arrogant bandit, the tearful widow and, through the weird incantations of a medium, the dead husband. Each of these contradictory accounts is fundamentally a lie, colored by the guilty motives of the teller. All three are exposed by a fourth version, told by the woodcutter, who turns out to have been an eyewitness to the whole incident; and even the woodcutter falsifies some of his own story to let himself off easy.

Brilliantly acted, Rashomon bulges with barbaric force. The bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is an unforgettable animal figure, grunting, sweating, swatting at flies that constantly light on his half-naked body, exploding in hyena-like laughter of scorn and triumph. But, more than a violent story, the film is a harsh study of universal drives stripped down to the core: lust, fear, selfishness, pride, hatred, vanity, cruelty. The woodcutter's version of the crime lays bare the meanness of man with Swiftian bitterness and contempt.

Then, as if unwilling to end on so despairing a note, Director Akira Kurosawa tacks on a hopeful epilogue: the three men in the rain-drenched ruins discover an abandoned baby, and, by the unselfish act of volunteering to adopt the child, the woodcutter restores the priest's faith in humanity. Though the film could hardly have found a better example of a compassionate saving grace, the scene seems an arbitrary afterthought that does not fit the story.

Rashomon has other failings. Its slow pace is deliberate and consistent enough to be accepted as a matter of style, presumably designed to the Japanese taste, yet U.S. moviegoers are likely to find much of it draggy. One long sequence is spoiled by a musical score that borrows freely from Ravel's Bolero, and Director Kurosawa, though obviously gifted, sometimes becomes self-consciously infatuated with the look of his own images. For all that, Rashomon is a novel, stimulating moviegoing experience, and a sure sign that U.S. film importers will be looking hard at Japanese pictures from now on.

Weekend with Father (UniversaI-International) is put together with the simple precision of an equation in Algebra I. Van Heflin is a widower with two children (girls) and a dog. Patricia Neal is a widow with two children (boys) and a dog. Widower meets widow in Grand Central Terminal while seeing the children off to summer camps. Result: a swift courtship and a drive up to Maine to break the news of the engagement to the kids.

The two dogs get along as well as their owners, but the children resist each other and their prospective stepparents. Heflin suffers pratfalls at the hands of Patricia's boys and an embarrassing visit from an old flame (Virginia Field). Patricia, goaded by jealousy and split loyalties, is wooed by the head counselor (Richard Denning). It appears that widower may lose widow, but the children, ever wise in grown-up ways, trick their parents into getting together again.

The sum of these used parts is a trifling little number that Hollywood calls a family comedy. This one is just a fraction better than most such because of Actor Heflin's smooth performance and Actor Denning's amusingly obnoxious portrait of a hearty bore with big muscles and a zest for wheat germ and yogurt.

*Translation: In the Forest.

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