The New Pictures

The Vanishing Prairie (Walt Disney), the second of Walt Disney's full-length nature films, was fortunate enough last week to have one of its scenes, in which the audience watches the birth of a buffalo calf, banned by the New York State Board of Censors. A week later the censor reconsidered, but the headlines had already had their effect. As a result of the publicity, the picture will probably do very well at the box office.

Birth, it is clear from this scene, can no more be the subject of prurience than death can. Both are too simple and important. The cow lies slightly wrenched, the birthling in its blue caul glides gleaming into the world, the mother licks off the membrane and swallows it to help start the flow of milk, the calf staggers up blindly to the food it trusts will be there. The camera watches it all with a grave directness proper to an acolyte at a mystery, and even the incessant commentator seems to realize that the situation does not require cute remarks. In fact, if the average Hollywood picture had an approach to sex and life as healthy and honest as Producer Disney shows here, no parent would need think twice about sending his children to the movies.

The furor over this scene, though indeed it is the most impressive one in the film, is likely to distract attention from the picture as a whole; and the whole is an ambitious attempt to show what the American heartland was like when 60 million buffaloes roamed the plains. Disney fails--partly because of the smug, fatherly pats of approval he keeps giving the animal kingdom, as though he personally had founded it with Mickey Mouse. Here and there, however, the picture has a patch of beauty briary enough (as the nursery rhyme puts it) to scratch a man's eyes in. Some patches:

P: The panchromatic windbaggery of the prairie chicken, as he swells his senatorial gullet of purplish brown and canary yellow, and gobbles forth his filibuster of love.

P: A jack rabbit's getaway, shown in slow motion that reveals the jazz-beat leg action he uses to avoid tight places.

P: The savage attack of a 2-lb. prairie dog on a 2,000-lb. buffalo that ventures too close to the prairie dog's hole.

As usual, when Disney is being his lighthearted, heavy-footed self, there are a few real esthetic crashers to boggle at. The worst scene features a number of bighorn rams ramming each other tirelessly, in time with the Anvil Chorus.

Even so, the beasts of the field (devotedly taken on film by Tom McHugh, James R. Simon. N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., Cleveland P. Grant and others) marvelously save the situation with their grace and large-eyed innocence, the way children often do when Daddy is being his worst.

Broken Lance (20th Century-Fox) takes the cinemagoer to the Old Southwest, where Cattle Baron Spencer Tracy, a likable old tyrant, has plenty of beef on the range and plenty of stewing at home. For one thing, his three eldest sons (by a first marriage) resent having to work for their tough old man; further, like almost everybody else in the area, they resent Tracy's second wife, a loving, stoical, full-blooded Indian princess (Katy Jurado). and their half-breed brother (Robert Wagner), who is also papa's pet.

Seeing no reason for all the hatred. Tracy returns it with benign contempt for all except his wife and half-breed son. Everybody is intriguing all over the place as usual, when Tracy finds himself the object of a lawsuit. Thanks to papa's implacability, Robert Wagner goes to jail and the eldest son (Richard Widmark) takes over the family empire from the heartbroken old man. The subplot is the love affair between the governor's daughter (Jean Peters) and Wagner.

Only the direction of Edward (The Caine Mutiny) Dmytryk manages to keep this horseplay in proper focus. Tracy's acting is the best thing in the movie, with Katy Jurado's Indian and Widmark's Hopalong Cassius following a close second.

In addition there are some fine CinemaScope views--notably a bleak, well-accented funeral scene for the old man. But this hardly makes up for the fact that Broken Lance is really a straight remake of Edward G. Robinson's House of Strangers (TIME, July 18, 1949), a family-vendetta film that even carried the same screen credit for writer (Philip Yordan) and producer (Sol Siegel).

King Richard and the Crusaders

(Warner) is another Middle-East western, this time a CinemaScopic romp with Sir Walter Scott's The Talisman. Trouping through the Warner-Colored desert on the Third Crusade are George Sanders, who plays King Richard the Lionhearted with a sour disposition; Rex Harrison, as the wily Saracen leader. Sultan Saladin, a sort of Noel Coward in sheik's clothing; Newcomer Laurence Harvey as Richard's loyal Scots bodyguard, Sir Kenneth; and Virginia Mayo, as the unlikely royal cousin. Edith Plantagenet.

Director David Butler shows plainly why the Crusades never really amounted to much. Everybody in Richard's camp was too busy with his own private intrigues: Sir Giles Amaury, the dastardly Grand Master of the Castelain Knights, is trying to take over the crusade in a reach for power; Austria's Duke Leopold would like the leadership, but he is drunk most of the time; France's King Philip is just tired and wants to pack up and go home; and even Sir Kenneth is playing footie with Virginia Mayo right under Richard's tent flap. The tricky plot is overburdened with an ineffectual assortment of jousts, bouts, chases and maces. Actor Sanders appears more chicken-than lionhearted. so that when Lady Edith, in true Hollywoodian-crusader style, pouts: "War, war, that's all you ever think of, Dick Plantagenet!", hardly anyone will believe her.

Magnificent Obsession (Universal-International) is a remake of the 1935 tear-jerker done by Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne. Based on Lloyd C. Douglas' bestseller, the new picture easily rates four handkerchiefs.

The story, as it might have been explained in preliminary conferences in the Hollywood studio: "Well, there's this magnificent obsession, see? It all comes about when this wealthy young guy unwittingly hastens the death of a fine, altruistic surgeon and then, in a car accident, causes the doctor's widow to go blind . . . " The current rich young ne'er-do-well (Rock Hudson) at first tries to buy repentance with $25,000 checks. Then, as he falls in love with the widow (Jane Wyman), his regeneration becomes genuine. His obsession is to perform great, anonymous deeds of charity and meanwhile to make a great surgeon of himself. In time, he saves the widow's life as well as her sight on the operating table.

Wyman and Hudson do pretty well with their soap operatics against a variety of Technicolored backgrounds. Barbara Rush, the widow's stepdaughter, and Agnes Moorehead, a levelheaded nurse and family confidante, are fine in supporting roles.

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