The New Pictures, Apr. 29, 1946

The Virginian (Paramount). Everett Cyril Johnson, who claimed to be the Virginian of Owen Wister’s novel, died in Calgary, Alberta just before this latest einemadaptation of his exploits was released. It was for him, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

This old sway-backed horse opera should have been put out to pasture long ago. Even saddled with Technicolor (about as subtle as a show card) and ridden by Old Hand Joel McCrea (about as expressive as lumber), The Virginian makes a bad run of it. Most to blame is the story; its gingham charm has worn thin. And as in most Westerns, acting and direction are as lifeless as a frontier cemetery. Even when the Virginian cracks his famed whip-line—”When you call me that, smile”—not Badman Trampas (the ubiquitous Brian Donlevy), but the audience complies.

Top Year for Oaters. The first Successful storytelling movie made in the U.S., The Great Train Robbery (1903) was what the trade calls an oater—a Western. David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun, which at $6,000,000 will outcost any other film ever made, is essentially another oater. Inspired less by Duel than by the end of war and the insatiable appetite for action, the major studios are this year spending some $20,000,000 on “class” oaters.

Safe Investment. In the 19103 a $9,000 Western was a major production. Even in the ‘203 cowboys would take a fall for a dollar and bulldog a rider off a running horse for two. Today stunt men get $35 per fall, $100 more for tougher stunts, $250 for a high dive into a lake. The average Western cost $15,000 to $35,000 in the ‘303; today, rising costs have boomeranged this to $75,000.

Rogers & Autry films, aristocrats among the Western series (in which the same stars and support appear six to eight times a year), cost up to a quarter of a million—and a Rogers film can be counted on to gross $650,000. Ordinary oaters return at least a 50% profit. Oaters are, in fact, about the safest investments in the business; their fixed gross can generally be estimated within a few thousand dollars. Of the 316 films made in Hollywood in 1944, 83, or 26%, were Westerns. Aside from the class Western, the only notable development during the past 40 years has been the singing Western, which came into being purely as an expedient when Gene Autry, a cowboy minstrel on a Chicago radio station, came to Hollywood in the early ‘303. Gene had been bought for his radio following; it was clear that he had to keep on singing. It was also clear that a man can’t very well burst into song with both guns smoking and his spurs mixed up in a dead heavy; so the primordial, hard-riding, lone-wolfish hero (best personified by Bill Hart) gave way to the more folksy, even mildly urbane type. Gene and Roy Rogers, like their prototypes, turn up in time’s nick to liquidate wrongdoers and still ride fast to get there, but they are never the grim-lipped supermen of the sage wastes—just neighbors down the road.

*According to Johnson, he and Wister were ranch hands together. When Wister, years later, told him he was the hero of the novel, Johnson replied: “Well, that’s going to be quite a book, that’s all I can say.”