Word: technicoloration
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...Wild Heart often turns out tame in its preordained plotting, but the story has been imaginatively told by Britain's pro-ducing-directing-writing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes).* The picture has a warm, earthy flavor with handsomely photographed Technicolor scenes of the rolling Shropshire countryside. And a strong cast helps cover up some of the story weaknesses: David Farrar swaggers masterfully as the horsy squire, and Cyril Cusack is appropriately pale and wan as the deserted parson. But it is in Jennifer Jones's lush, wide-eyed performance...
Zazu Pitts, long hoped retired or committed, returns to the screen with a plop as the comedy relief, which is neither comic nor relieving. It rather adds to the strain. In short, there is little more universally entertaining that a western, especially in technicolor, even when written to a formula. But if action becomes drudgery, if lines are sighed instead of spat, and if actors look like hod-carriers hurrying to get a union-day's work done, the series of scenes moves like a man blind with amnesia. LAURENCE D. SAVADOVE
About Face (Warner) adds lustrous Technicolor and several lackluster songs & dances to the old stage (1936) and screen (1938) farce, Brother Rat. There are some strictly unmilitary goings-on at Southern Military Institute. Against Institute regulations, Cadet Eddie Bracken is secretly married to Phyllis Kirk, who is about to become a mother; Cadet Dick Wesson does not know that Betty Short (Virginia Gibson) is really Betty Long, daughter of the new commandant; Cadet Gordon MacRae sings such songs as Spring Has Sprung, and spikes an unpleasant chemistry instructor's hair tonic with green and blue dyes...
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...
...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...