Word: tucson
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...budget was as commonplace an item in a producer's checkbook as a mink coat for the wife. Needing a fancy jewel to decorate its year's offerings, Columbia allotted it $1,500,000. Producer-Director Ruggles hiked his company off to a location near Tucson, battled weather, dust and sickness last summer until his costs had mounted to $2,250,000. Rival studios, shaving the bumps off their budgets, are now anxiously eying its reception...
Arizona has all the symptoms of a spectacle. The prelude, in which the camera follows a long caravan across the mountains into the dirty, becrusted little town of Tucson, is filled with all the miscellany which Hollywood attaches to a scene to make it Big. The Tucson of 1860 is painstakingly reproduced to the smallest adobe-brick hut; the streets are crawling with extras, packed with props. Before the end there appear at one time or another 600 head of Hereford cattle, 485 horses, 1,200 ("thousands of") extras, 150 rippling, bare-skinned Papago Indians...
...prodigality, Director Ruggles avoided the temptation to let his camera linger longingly on this impressive and costly background. He hewed to the narrative of pretty Phoebe Titus (Tomboy Jean Arthur), the only white woman in Tucson, who earns herself a pretty penny selling pies for $1 apiece, then goes into the freighting business. The gentleman with whom she later contracts Arizona's first all-white marriage is genial, peripatetic Peter Muncie (William Holden), a slim and smiling young pioneer who rides into Tucson with other settlers and passes some fond words with Phoebe before setting out for California...
...pair of sleazy scoundrels characterized by such lines as: "If Muncie doesn't get back to Arizona with the cattle, we'll take over Phoebe's freighting business and land. (Pause.) If he does, there'll be an Indian attack just before he reaches Tucson-and we'll still own everything the lady...
William R. Waddoll 1M, Tucson, Ariz.; and Theodore P. Roble 3M, New York...