The New Pictures

Along the Great Divide (Warner) goes on the theory that an established star's debut in chaps & spurs calls for a little tone. To make Kirk Douglas at home on the range, the movie adopts a solemn, moody pace and a story line that tries him mightily with all the usual hazards that western heroes are heir to, and caps it all by supplying him with a high-class neurosis.

U.S. Marshal Douglas rescues a salty old rustler (Walter Brennan) from being lynched as a murderer, and starts back with him to distant Santa Loma for trial. Along the way he endures interference by the rustler's hellcatty daughter (Virginia Mayo), ambush and pursuit by the lynch mob, the shooting of one deputy, the treachery of another, the loss of his horse, a desert sandstorm and a three-day spell of thirst and sleeplessness. Worst of all, he is sorely tormented by his prisoner's sadistic singing of a ballad that summons up the marshal's old guilt complex over the death of his father.

The hero still has enough energy to reach town, discover the real murderer, shoot it out with him, lick his neurosis, win the girl. Being only human, audiences are likely to fatigue more readily than Marshal Douglas.

The Hollywood Story (Universal-International) is a very poor man's Sunset Boulevard. Like its predecessor it shows the Hollywood of the present poking into the Hollywood past, with the movie great at work and at play, and screen oldtimers (Francis X. Bushman, Helen Gibson, William Farnum) as they look today. But the new movie is a formula whodunit without benefit of suspense, characterization, or anything else except some superficial Hollywood atmosphere.

The story turns on the 22-year-old unsolved murder of a famed movie director of the silent era.* Independent Producer Richard Conte determines to make a picture about the crime and, by the dime-novel logic that governs The Hollywood Story, decides he must solve it first. He rakes up old clues, gets shot at for his pains, goes staunchly on through a gallery of suspects: his business partner (Fred Clark), a onetime matinee idol (Paul Cavanaugh), a silent movie queen's daughter Julia Adams), a veteran scripter (Henry Hull).

Unlike Sunset Boulevard, its pale counterpart stirs no emotion and avoids any commentary on the manners & morals of Hollywood, past or present. But it courts some unanticipated resentment and unwitting pathos in the exploitation of the faded oldtimers whom it uses as trophy-like props to dress up a few brief scenes.

When The Hollywood Story was previewed last month at the Academy Award Theater, studio pressagents invited silent-screen veterans to be on hand for the occasion, fulsomely saluted them in publicity handouts as "the Hollywood greats who reigned before the days of the Oscar . . . headliners whose glamour gave the film community its worldwide fame." The invitations billed the affair simply as a tribute to the oldtimers, failed to mention the movie.

To a newsman, Elmo Lincoln, sixtyish, the screen's original Tarzan, offered a bitter reaction: "Every time they want to exploit something like Hollywood Story, they call on us. We're not getting any money out of this ... All of us who worked in Hollywood Story got $15.56 a day, the minimum extra rate, for one day's work. The principals, like Helen Gibson and Francis X. Bushman, who had dialogue, got $55 for their day's work. They paid us for that one day and they've gotten $15,000 worth of publicity out of it. If I had the opportunity, I'd stand right there on that stage tonight and say: 'Why don't we get work?' . . . The motion picture industry is the most unappreciative, selfish business in America today."

*Suggested by the murder of Director William Desmond Taylor, who was shot in the back in his Los Angeles cottage, Feb. 1, 1922.

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