The New Pictures, Oct. 23, 1950

The Miniver Story (M-G-M). Eight years ago, against the flaming backdrop of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, Sidney Franklin produced the successful Mrs. Miniver. For this sequel, Producer Franklin has assembled four of the original cast* but, as is often the case with sequels, most of the magic is gone.

From the start it is clear that Greer Garson has been stricken with one of those dread, nameless Hollywood diseases that will kill her off in the last reel. She receives the news with a chin-up, clear-eyed gallantry that has her doctor blubbering. When Walter Pidgeon, her remarkably obtuse husband, finally catches on, he too is reduced to choked-up admiration. Meanwhile, Greer gently discourages a U.S. colonel (John Hodiak) who is in love with her, straightens out the affairs of her nitwit daughter (Cathy O’Donnell), and sets right the tangled marriage of a British general (Leo Genn). The story, which has a promising future as a radio soap opera, is filmed through a heavy meringue of sentiment.

Two Flags West [20th Century-Fox] is another “different” western with a Civil War setting. Among its surprises: 1) an unkissed Linda Darnell, 2) a battle in which the Indians lick the soldiers.

The movie starts in a Northern prisoner-of-war camp where a Union captain (Cornel Wilde) is recruiting captured Confederate cavalrymen to serve against the Indians on the Western frontier. A Southern colonel (Joseph Cotten) and the remnants of his troop sign up. Arriving at the frontier post of Fort Thorn, they not only find themselves surrounded by Kiowas and Apaches, but are tempted to treason by undercover Confederate agents. They are also badgered by the fort’s Rebel-hating commanding officer (Jeff Chandler), who was disabled at Bull Run, lost his brother at Chancellorsville, and has a lively interest in his brother’s widow (Linda Darnell).

Cotten and his men decide to desert and go to Texas and the Confederacy, but they have a change of heart when the Kiowas, infuriated because Chandler has executed their chief’s son, storm the fort. With the garrison about to fall, the Indians indicate that they will settle for Chandler. He marches alone into their encampment to what—judging from his screams—must be a gaudy death.

Two Flags West was written and produced by Casey (The Macomber Affair) Robinson with obvious enthusiasm. Director Robert Wise gets much of the authenticity of Brady’s famed Civil War photographs into the bleak details of the P.W. camp and the isolated frontier post. Jeff Chandler (who was the upstanding Indian chief in Broken Arrow) plays the bitter and contemptuous commanding officer of Fort Thorn with such conviction that he very nearly steals the picture from Stars Cotten and Darnell. When the Kiowas come swarming into the fort, Two Flags West ends with just about as rousing an Indian fight as Hollywood has ever produced.

The Toast of New Orleans (MGM) is a big, beautiful, overblown and slightly dull Technicolor musical. It opens with a shot of happy villagers gamboling in the Louisiana bayou country, then moves quickly upriver to concentrate on high life in New Orleans at the turn of the century. Its tenuous story concerns the wooing of an opera singer (Kathryn Grayson) by a L’il Abner-type fisherman (Mario Lanza). In & out of the Opera House, Lanza and decorative Kathryn Grayson sing a number of duets and solos by Puccini, Bizet, Verdi, Mozart, and by a composer named Nicholas Brodszky, whose Be My Love is the movie’s theme song. Both Kathryn and Lanza get through the songs with competence and are easy to watch. David Niven, as Kathryn’s rejected lover, walks through his part, and J. Carrol Naish, as Lanza’s yokel father, supplies some dialect comedy.

Pretty Baby (Warner) is an infantile farce about a working girl (Betsy Drake) who carries a blanket-wrapped doll so she can get a seat on the subway. A baby-food tycoon (Edmund Gwenn), who takes her for an unwed mother, becomes her benefactor. Her bosses, Admen Dennis Morgan and Zachary Scott, taking her for Gwenn’s mistress, use her as a foil to get his name on an advertising contract. Despite Actress Drake’s talent for caricaturing her own flatfooted walk, angular gestures and pear-shaped enunciation, the movie puts only a drop of fun into a bucket of familiar confusion.

*Notably missing: Richard Ney, who played Mrs. Miniver’s son. Ney and Greer Garson were married in 1943, divorced in 1947.