The New Pictures

The Horse Soldiers (Mirisch; United Artists). "Thundah in thuh outhouse!" the startled Mississippi belle (Constance Towers) exclaims. "Them's Yankees!" Them, to be more precise, is the 1st Brigade, U.S. Cavalry. Colonel John Wayne commanding, and they are plunging along toward Newton Station in Director John Ford's $5,000,000 screen version of Grierson's Raid through the depths of Confederate territory during Grant's advance on Vicksburg. Summoning all her Southern charm, the proud beauty invites Wayne and his officers to dinner. Making the most of her downfall neckline, she leans low over the harried foe and offers him chicken: "What was yoah preference, thuh laig or thuh breast?"

He would prefer, Colonel Wayne informs her, the pleasure of her company during the rest of the raid. So off they all go, plodding along at a pace that is unhistoric as well as uncinematic, to the climactic engagement--in which Colonel Wayne is decisively defeated.

It's all good clean fun, especially for customers who like John Wayne and don't care much about Grierson's Raid. For those who do not like Wayne there is William Holden, who comes along for the ride as a military surgeon, and prescribes penicillin, or something mighty like it, a good 80 years before it was discovered. For those who like tennis there is Althea Gibson, women's national champion, who plays a slave. For those who collect rocks --the kind that comes out of scriptwriters' heads--there are the following specimens of Civil War speech: 1) "So long, croaker!" 2) "Take care, section hand!" 3) "Get off my back!"

Great Is My Country (Sovexportfilm) is the Soviet Union's loaded propaganda weapon sent along to accompany Russia's cultural exhibition (TIME. July 6). Filmed in a washed-out Red version of Cinerama called Kinopanorama, featuring a record-breaking--and superfluous--total of nine stereophonic sound tracks. Great Is My Country's 1 1/2-hour barrage turns out to have been fired by a small bore.

The movie offers Sovcolor shots of the spectacular fountains at Peter the Great's palace at Leningrad, then ecstatically describes panoramas of steel plants, oil rigs, coal trains. There are sequences of carefree Russians churning up the Volga in a motor launch, of the "volunteers" who whistle while they work to make Siberia a mountain greenery home. In the Caucasus, bikini-clad beauties splash in the Black Sea. It is enough to make the St. Petersburg, Fla. Chamber of Commerce ask Washington for equal time.

Technically, the movie causes curiosity about how the Reds ever got Sputnik off the launching pad. Filmed with three different cameras simultaneously, the images are separated on the wide screen by blurry stripes from top to bottom. The sound track is unpleasantly thunderous, and the Soviet scriptwriters have produced a painful brand of Americanese, delivered through stereophonic loudspeakers located south by southeast of the viewer's ear. Horrible example: "Gee. I'd like to fly on a TU-1O4," says the lady narrator. Reply from the Russian guide (south by southwest): "I think it's just as nice to walk in the country you call home."

Shake Hands with the Devil (Pennebaker; United Artists) turns a heap of expensive ingredients--James Cagney, Don Murray, Michael Redgrave, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Dana Wynter, Glynis Johns--into an everyday Irish stew. Taken from a 1934 novel by Rearden Conner, the plot concerns a young American (Murray), a medical student in Dublin just after World War I, who finds himself innocently involved in "The Trouble." Pursued by the Black and Tans, he is spirited away by one of his professors (Cagney), who turns out to be a high officer in the Irish Republican Army. Grateful and idealistic, he joins the underground struggle against England, but soon comes face to face with the usual conflict between love (Wynter) and duty. In the novel, the hero resolved it by selling his friends to the Tans; according to the script, the peace treaty conveniently gets him off the hook, and only the diehard Cagney has to die. Best bit: a dockside rumble in which Cagney. jazzy as ever with his side arms, sputters some real far-out riffs on his revolver. Worst fault: the inconsistency of speech. Four of the featured players speak the king's English. Two of them talk plain American. Only the bit-players, picked up from the Abbey Theater and other Dublin companies, ever seem to have honestly laid lip to the Blarney stone.

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