All Outdoors

Three new movies set their trivial doings against large landscapes:

Kangaroo (20th Century-Fox), the product of a 9,200-mile location trek, is the first Hollywood movie to be made in Australia. The trip paid off with striking Technicolor scenes that Director Lewis Milestone shot around Sydney and rugged Flinders Range: a cattle stampede in a bushfire, a corroboree rain dance, a blistering dust storm and a slashing bullwhip battle between a couple of bushrangers.

Unfortunately, the trip was not necessary for a plot that is homegrown Hollywood, a handsome bushranger (Peter Lawford), who is wanted by the police, poses as Rancher Finlay Currie's long-lost son. But when Lawford finds that he has an unbrotherly affection for Currie's red-haired daughter (Maureen O'Hara), he owns up to his real identity, with the result that both love and justice come out on top Down Under.

The Wild North (MGM) revives that familiar old figure of fresh-air fiction, the Canadian Mountie (Wendell Corey) who is out to get his man. In this version the quarry is a killer (Stewart Granger) who, as it turns out, has done his shooting in self-defense. On the way back, a wolf pack takes a few bites out of Corey, and Granger ends up by bringing in the Mountie. Also present: a beautiful Indian girl (Cyd Charisse) who is fond of Granger. There are vivid color shots of the snowy north country and several lusty action scenes, but The Wild North is mostly woolly movie drama.

The Denver & Rio Grande (Nat Holt; Paramount) pits two rival railroads of the 1870s against each other. The Denver & Rio Grande is represented by tough, honest Edmond O'Brien, and the Canyon City & San Juan is represented by tough, dishonest Sterling Hayden. After payroll holdups, gun battles, a landslide, dynamiting and a head-on train collision, right triumphs, and the Rio Grande comes through on schedule. The Denver & Rio Grande chugs through impressive Technicolor Rocky Mountain scenery, mostly at a slow-freight pace. Among the characters mouthing wooden dialogue in this little iron-horse opera: Dean Jagger and J. Carrol Naish as pioneer railroad men, and Zasu Pitts as a fluttery frontier belle.

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