Cinema: The New Pictures: Jan. 14, 1935

West of the Pecos (RKO).

A staple of the industry from 1912 until 1928 when sound supplemented sight, “Westerns” have lately been relegated to the oblivion of double-feature bills, week-end matinees for children. On the chance that Legion of Decency approval will give them a new impetus, RKO took special pains with this one. Its story is by Zane Grey. Its cast includes Richard Dix, Martha Sleeper, Louise Beavers and an imitator of Stepin Fetchit who uses a preposterous pseudonym, “Sleep ‘n’ Eat.”

Connoisseurs of Westerns will not be deluded by its talent into thinking that West of the Pecos is any special treat. It concerns a Colonel Lambeth who finding his wife dead when he returns from the Civil War, goes to San Antonio with his daughter Terrill (Martha Sleeper), and two of their retainers. Masquerading as a boy, Terrill meets a cowboy, Pecos Smith (Richard Dix). Pecos helps the Lambeths settle in their new home. The Comanches whoop upon the hills, the rustlers shake their guns and Colonel Lambeth guzzles his mint-juleps. At the end of the picture, the rustlers and Comanches are all dead. Terrill learns from Pecos that her trousers have not fooled him.

That Westerns seldom appear now at large first-run theatres by no means indicates that they are obsolete. A dozen producing companies subsist upon profits from such pictures. B ‘n’ B, Ambassador, Exploitation, Golden State, Willis Kent, Principal, Stage & Screen, William Steiner and Superior together have 80 on their 1934-35 schedules. Less in demand west of the Mississippi. Westerns are greedily patronized in the South. They are particularly popular in Washington, D. C. Outstanding producer of Westerns, Monogram will make eight this year, 16 next—mostly on a ranch belonging to Trem Carr, the studio’s production chief. Columbia will this year make eight Westerns, starring Tim McCoy. Universal will make six with Buck Jones and a serial called Rustlers of Red Dog. Fox. long No. 1 producer of Westerns, plans to make six, starring George O’Brien. First Division Productions will make six this year, with Hoot Gibson as their star, and World Wide will make eight with Ken Maynard.

Busiest Western star is Universal’s Buck Jones. Since entering cinema, he has made 74 serials and features. A onetime rodeo performer, he lives on his San Fernando Valley ranch with his wife, whom he married on horseback, when they were both performing in a Wild West Show. Onetime cavalryman, aviator, trick-roper and auto-mechanic, Buck Jones made his cinema debut as an extra in 1917, became a major Fox star, at $2,500 a week. He now owns four horses, four dogs, three expensive cars, supports an So-piece band to represent his “Buck Jones Rangers’ a national organization of 3,000,000 members, from 8 to 18. Says he: “In my pictures, the right-thinking, right-acting, clean-living man always wins out.”

Monogram’s Western program is built around tall (6 ft., 5 in.) John Wayne, born Michael Morrison, Pasadena socialite, onetime University of Southern California footballer. His horse’s name is Lightning. Dirt cheap compared to most pictures, Westerns cost from $4,000 to $30,000 each. Famed Hoot Gibson (horse: “Hooter”) makes his pictures on his ranch near Hollywood wearing the championship belt he won at Pendleton Round-Ups.

It’s a Gift (Paramount).

Firmly established on that pinnacle of fame which great comedians have to reach before critics can discern in them the merits that have long been obvious to the public, W. C. Fields (William Claude Duganfield), in It’s a Gift, continues his policy of repeating for cinema audiences the routines that made him famed in the Follies. He struggles sadly to adjust a deck chair and ends by placing it carefully on a fire. He mistakes a pretentious estate for a picnic grounds and contrives to turn it into a shambles before he and his indignant party are ejected. The most harassing comic sequence in It’s a Gift shows its hero trying to catch a catnap on his back porch. His wife, the child on the floor above, the milkman, an insurance salesman, a fruit vendor, the telephone, and the swing on which he is lying combine to defeat his purpose.

The rambling plot of It’s a Gift concerns an incompetent grocer whose ambition is to own an orange ranch in Southern California. Written by Fields himself under his pen name of Charles Bogle, in collaboration with J. P. McEvoy, it has the advantage of disappearing completely at frequent intervals, of containing a role for Baby LeRoy as the foil for the Fields prejudice against small children. Best shots: Fields shaving while his daughter stands between him and the mirror; putting on a raccoon coat before entering the icebox of his store; removing feathers from a sandwich.

Bordertown (Warner).

Johnny Ramirez (Paul Muni) is suspended between two worlds. Out of the world into which he is born in the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles, he struggles to rise, working daytimes in a gas station, studying law at night, to a place in that magical world of wealth and opportunity flowering above him. He wants to be like Abraham Lincoln, whose picture adorns the walls of his office. Then he finds that the cut-rate education, achieved by him at such terrific pains, is useless as a weapon for success in a society which regards him merely, as a half-caste interloper. Johnny Ramirez rebels, turns back to the gutter world out of which he came. In Mexicali, the jingling bordertown where ethics and races have been mixed so long that neither matters much, he falls heir to the gambling business of Charlie Roark (Eugene Pallette) whose wife (Bette Davis) murders him so that she can have Johnny Ramirez.

Robert Lord’s excellent story weakens a little with Johnny’s violent reformation after his rejection as a husband by a society girl (Margaret Lindsay) who has found him amusing as a lover. It is, however, distinguished by the forceful and legitimate presentation of a “problem” character, by a magnificent performance on the part of Muni and an almost equally good one by Bette Davis, who has no equal on the screen for the portrayal of dementia praecox in its incipient stages. A nomination for the murder scene of the year might well be that one in which, struggling with the fat, good-natured Pallette lying drunk in his own car, Bette Davis gets the idea of killing him by closing the garage door and leaving the motor running.