The New Pictures

Plymouth Adventure (MGM) Historians are hazy as to exactly what happened aboard the Mayflower between the time it set sail from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16. 1620, and the time it landed 66 days later at Provincetown, Mass. MGM, attempting to fill in the historical gap, has drawn on what studio publicists call new, revealing research as well as on Ernest Gebler's imaginative 1950 novel and on some pure invention by Screenwriter Helen Deutsch. The resulting movie pictures the Atlantic crossing of the Pilgrim Fathers as a combination of storms above deck and stormy passions below deck.

According to the picture, the Pilgrims were not all austere Separatists from the Church of England seeking religious freedom in the new world; many were lusty men & women who wore colorful costumes and drank heartily of beer and whisky. Hardhearted Captain Christopher Jones (Spencer Tracy) despised the Pilgrims as hypocrites and fools until he was mellowed by beautiful Dorothy Bradford (Gene Tierney), wife of the colony's second governor, William Bradford (Leo Genn). It was Mrs. Bradford's unrequited love for the skipper, according to Screenwriter Deutsch, that caused her to throw herself overboard.

The passenger list also included handsome young Cooper John Alden (Van Johnson) and baby-faced Priscilla Mullins (Dawn Addams). As for Captain Myles Standish (Noel Drayton), the picture portrays him as a happily married man who never courted Priscilla at all. With a shortage of food and water, but not of romance, the Mayflower finally makes Provincetown.

Producer Dore Schary hoped that Plymouth Adventure would "humanize" the Pilgrims, but they never emerge on the screen as flesh-and-blood characters. Ihe picture has a spectacular Atlantic storm, but most of the time the Pilgrims --and the audience--are merely awash in a sea of florid dialogue.

The Iron Mistress (Warner) is a dull-edged western about Frontiersman James Bowie (Alan Ladd) and his famous knife. According to this Technicolored biography, the Bowie knife--i.e., the iron mistress--was forged out of steel into which was fused the fragment of a meteor ("For better or worse, the knife has a bit of heaven in it--or a bit of hell," says one of the characters). So miraculously keen and deadly is this weapon that with it Bowie can kill off any number of his enemies--when he is not demolishing them, that is, with pistols, sword or fists.

Between bouts, Bowie is pictured as a gay blade with the girls. He dallies with scheming Creole Belle Virginia Mayo. But in the end he spurns her with an admonition ("No woman is worth the lives of eight men"), and goes off with beautiful, gentle Phyllis Kirk, daughter of the vice-governor of Texas. Bird fanciers may be interested to note that the picture depicts noted Ornithologist James Audubon (George Voskovec) as one of Bowie's conversational sparring partners.

Montana Belle (RKO Radio) casts Jane Russell as the infamous lady bandit Belle Starr, "who can ride and shoot like a man." When men are not falling dead in front of Belle's six-shooters, they are swooning at her feet. She is pursued by Outlaw Bob Dalton (Scott Brady), a lesser outlaw named Mac (Forrest Tucker) and a suave professional gambler (George Brent). Belle so inflames these various characters that they get to uttering such phrases to each other as: "No man takes a woman away from me and lives." During all this, Belle, dressed in tight black spangles, manages to find time to sing such songs as The Gilded Lily and My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon.

The climax finds Belle and her gang holding up the Oklahoma territorial bank. All the bad men are shot full of holes and Belle lies wounded in Brent's arms, secure in the knowledge that he will be waiting for her after she serves her jail sentence. Helping to make this horse opera practically indistinguishable from its numerous predecessors is the presence in the cast of gravel-voiced Andy Devine as a bearded itinerant trader.

The Brave Don't Cry (Group Three; Mayer-Kingsley) is a fairly maudlin title for a lean, unsparing movie about a Scottish mine disaster. Produced by oldtime Documentary-Maker John Grierson, the picture is based on a real-life disaster in the Knockshinnock Castle Colliery in 1950. It tells of a mine cave-in and the rescue of 118 miners trapped for two days in West No. 4 section between the firedamp and a flooded pit shaft.

The simple story is told without heroics or false sentiment. It is mostly a movie of waiting and of silences at the pithead and in the pit as the rescuers work their way toward the trapped men. "There's nothing to do but wait," says one miner's wife stoically. Except for an occasional Scottish song, the picture has no musical score--only the constant sounds of ticking clocks, dripping water and heavy breathing.

In its worthy effort to avoid trumped-up melodrama, The Brave Don't Cry sometimes seems barren of drama as well. Though it does not dig into its theme as deeply as the German Kameradschaft (1931) and the British The Stars Look Down (1939), it mines its particular dramatic vein, i.e., the ennobling dignity of man's courage, with honesty and fidelity.

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