Cinema: Down fhe Polaroid Trail

The week’s 3-D pictures concentrated on the photogenic West.

Inferno (20th Century-Fox). Robert Ryan, a young man about as rich as they come and as worthless as they go, is junketing in the great American Desert, along with his wife (Rhonda Fleming) and the man she secretly loves (William Lundigan). When Ryan falls from his horse and breaks a leg, the lovers ride off, leaving him to dry up and die in the staring sun. Ryan, whose spirit normally comes from a bottle, nevertheless finds the will to fight his way back to safety and salvation. The drama is high, but it would have been much heightened had not the uncertain artifices of 3-D photography made the awful antagonist, the desert, look about as realistic and terrifying as a 98¢ herbarium.

Hannah Lee (Jock Broder Productions) refers to a cowboy ballad used as background music to one more encounter between the wicked cattle barons and the hapless homesteaders. Macdonald Carey plays the hired gunman who slaps small boys, makes roughhouse passes at the beautiful saloonkeeper (Joanne Dru), and shoots harmless people dead. For all the gunplay, the film limps along from anticlimax to anticlimax, but moviegoers may be beguiled by some spectacular Technicolor scenery. As the U.S. marshal who goes to the rescue, John Ireland sets some sort of precedent by losing all his fist fights and getting shot down in the final gun battle with Badman Carey, who is then done in by Joanne Dru.