Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 30, 1947

Fiesta (MGM) is tacked together out of Technicolor, leftover story formulas and shopworn lace, to shelter three possible excuses for a picture: music, dancing and bullfighting. The bullring sequences get along without picadors or coups de grace, and apparently the same old company bull is photographed again & again. More stirring is Johnny (Body & Soul) Green’s rearrangement of Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico. Bits of the dancing (by Mexican Star Ricardo Montalban and Cyd Charisse) are more tense and percussive than the brand generally seen north of the border.

The story is less novel. Mario (Ricardo Montalban), son of a famed Mexican ex-matador (Fortunio Bonanova), has talent in the bull ring, but his heart is in his music. When all Mexico accuses him of cowardice, his twin sister Maria (Esther Williams) doubles for him and, in a slather of veronicas, saves his reputation. He returns the compliment by saving her life. After that he proceeds to the conservatory with father’s blessing. Sister is happy with her young man (John Carroll), and everything ends in a fiesta. Blonde, blooming Esther Williams is about as Mexican as Harry Truman, but a lot more fun to look at.

Cheyenne (Warner) is as hard to distinguish from most other westerns as one Fred Harvey lunchroom is from the next. Dennis Morgan chases assorted desperadoes up & down hill through semi-arid shrubbery and past many picturesque specimens of erosion. The desperadoes chase the stagecoaches. Every so often someone gets shot, plunges from saddle or coachman’s seat and rolls over & over. The hero plugs four desperate characters, largely because they hadn’t lived long enough to learn that in bright sunlight a man’s shadow can forecast his presence, however stealthy.

Mr. Morgan, an agent of justice, pretends before the lesser crooks that he is a major public menace called The Poet. Then he has to convince them that he is the husband of The Poet’s wife (Jane Wyman). This offers a chance for a tedious kind of bedroom humor from which westerns used to be a refuge; at one point Mr. Morgan and Miss Wyman, snug under separate blankets, even play footie. Entertaining moment: Janis Paige, bulging a skintight costume and singing Cheyenne, a pretty nice oat-fed tune.

The Unfaithful (Warner) is the story of a too-lonely wife (Ann Sheridan) who concealed her unfaithfulness from her husband (Zachary Scott); and of the anguish that ensued when he found out about it. Such a story, honestly told, could have had the customers on the edges of their seats, and could have made a fortune at the box office. But that was too simple. The Unfaithful tells it in the complicated or Hollywood way.

Miss Sheridan kills her ex-lover. Then his vengeful widow (played with notable intensity by Marta Mitrovich) and a crooked art dealer (well played by Steven Geray) try to blackmail her. Her efforts to keep the truth from her husband bring on other complications and the whole business becomes a court-and-headline scandal. Battling their way through the excess plot like machete-swinging explorers of the Mato Grosso, Mr. Scott and Miss Sheridan express the emotions that might be expected of them; acidulous Eve Arden and earnest Divorce Lawyer Lew Ayres finally persuade them to give their marriage another try.

The picture has a reasonably grown-up point of view, although it never suggests that Scott’s jealousy, and his childish indulgence of it, might be as ignoble as his wife’s deceit. But it urges, in fairly blunt terms for the screen, that war wives suffered from celibacy as well as the sugar shortage. There is also a suggestion that forgiveness is desirable and hasty divorces undesirable.

But the picture strikes one very queer note: its infatuation with breadwinning as the real measure of stability and wholesome family life. When Scott gets good & sore at his wife, he just can’t give a hoot for moneymaking, and that neglect is represented as close to the ultimate catastrophe. But he recovers. Within a few hours after she has killed a man in her parlor, and is still suffering from shock, he leaves her, with her entire approval, for more important matters at The Office.