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Love Is Better Than Ever (MGM) works at a strenuous little plot about a dewy-eyed New Haven dancing teacher (Elizabeth Taylor), who is out to hook a blase Broadway agent (Larry Parks). In the course of her campaign, she 1) annoys him by publicly announcing their nonexistent engagement, 2) gets him tangled up in a troupe of twirling moppets at a dance recital, 3) taunts him with being a "flesh peddler." Elizabeth Taylor, ineptly striving for comic form, reveals a photogenic figure, but Parks falls flat on his farce. Completed early in 1951, Love Is Better Than Ever was temporarily shelved for political reasons, after Parks appeared last March before the Un-American Activities Committee and admitted that he was once a Communist Party member. The whole movie might well have been shelved permanently for artistic reasons.

Bend of the River (Universal) sheds enough Technicolored blood to drench half a dozen ordinary westerns. It starts with a near-miss when Jimmy Stewart, guide of an Oregon-bound wagon train, saves Arthur Kennedy from being lynched as a horse thief. Soon they are both busy sticking knives into a raiding party of Shoshone Indians.

When the settlers reach Oregon, the blood really starts to flow: a pitched battle in Portland, a running fight up the Columbia River, an ambuscade on the slopes of Mt. Hood. Having eliminated most of the badmen on the Pacific Coast, Stewart and Kennedy start taking potshots at each other, and stage their final death grapple in a mountain torrent. At intervals in the gunfire, Stewart and Gambler Rock Hudson make sheep's eyes at Julia Adams and Lori Nelson. Funnyman Stepin' Fetchit, after a movie absence of 15 years, is back in Bend of the River as a molasses-slow deckhand on a river boat.

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