The New Pictures

Valley of the Giants (Warner Bros.), like Drums (see below), takes color completely in its stride. And its Paul Bunyanesque stride is suitable to Peter B. Kyne's famed tale of lumberjacking and land grabbing in California's redwood forests. Charles Bickford, as head of a crooked gang of Eastern lumber barons, is determined to whittle the world's oldest stand of timber down to shingle slabs. Wayne Morris, an idealistic young landowner, is committed to preserving his mortgaged title to acreage that the gang needs to complete its shocking plan. The changing sympathies of Claire Trevor, a blonde croupiere, help determine the outcome of the struggle.

Valley of the Giants surrounds its heroic theme with robust climaxes as huge, numerous, tightly packed and ancient as the rings on a redwood stump. They include a free-for-all fight wherein a redheaded lumberjack named Ox (Alan Hale) demolishes a barroom singlehanded; a wrestle to the death between Bickford and Morris on the edge of a precipice; a train wreck from which hero rescues heroine by a margin narrow enough to make nervous cinemaddicts avert their eyes; a dynamite explosion, an exhibition of fly-casting, a minor log jam and a conflagration. All this action takes place to a running accompaniment of strong talk and more or less continuous gunfire.

Arrival of color photography as a standard item of Hollywood technique will be signalized only when critics give it the final seal of their approval by not mentioning it at all. Valley of the Giants is photographically far enough ahead of its time to deserve this type of accolade. Rich forest greens, the deep tones of turn-of-the-century interiors, the cheerful glow of full bottles on a well-stocked bar help immeasurably to give the picture character and substance. Its life blood, however, is a story which, although it is a throwback to silent cinema classics, has derived through them some of the heroic sweep and thunder of the West's lore of legendary foresters. Good shot: a falling redwood seen through a stationary camera sighting along the trunk of the tree as it levels with the lens.

Drums (London Film), most elaborate color film ever made by a British company, is also the British cinema industry's first major investigation of a subject which has often interested Hollywood: empire building in the north of India. Largely made on location near Chitral, Drums contains some of the most dazzling sequences ever recorded in Technicolor, but Director Zoltan Korda--wiser than many of his U. S. colleagues when confronted with this medium for the first time--refused to let it get out of hand. Consequently, his picture marches with considerably more vigor than anything his brother Alexander Korda's London Film Productions has made since The Private Life of Henry VIII, rates as the No. 1 British export of the year.

Under its fancy dress, Drums turns out on close inspection to stem less from U. S. predecessors like Lives of a Bengal Lancer than a merger of early epics about the winning of the West, with the usurping Prince Ghul substituting for Sitting Bull and the Khyber Pass as stand-in for the Oregon Trail. Principal distinction between its plot and that of the early American version of the same theme is that, instead of a golden-haired heroine, the Prince (Raymond Massey) maltreats his brown-faced little Hindu nephew (Sabu). Busily organizing a gigantic revolt of all the border tribes from Afghanistan to China, Guhl undertakes to cross a tight-lipped British cavalry captain (Roger Livesey), whose function in the film is roughly equivalent to that of the Lone Ranger in a mess jacket. By the time this error has had its inevitable consequences, small Sabu is back on the throne where he belongs, and U. S. audiences, if they feel faintly cheated because there has not been any scalping, will at least have been rewarded by a full quota of parades, whiskey drinking, bagpipe music, sword dancing, gunplay in the palace courtyard and fine, old-fashioned British slang.

Son of a mahout in the elephant stables of the Maharaja of Mysore, Sabu was picked by Director Robert Flaherty to play the lead in Elephant Boy two years ago. Now 15 and one of the half-dozen highest paid child stars in cinema, he goes to a boarding school at Beaconsfield, where he plays halfback on the second Rugby team, keeps a flat in London, where he lives with his brother, a tutor and three servants, drives himself about in a miniature car, often visits the London zoo, where he makes friends with the elephants and stables his mongoose, Rikki. In his first picture, Sabu memorized the sound of English words, spoke them without understanding. Now, having packed a lifetime's schooling into two years, he not only speaks and reads English but can read French and Latin as well, hopes to get into Oxford in three years. Last week, Sabu sailed on the Aquitania for his first visit to the U. S., in the course of which he will attend the premiere of Drums, call on Mrs. Roosevelt, meet Shirley Temple in Hollywood.

My Lucky Star (Twentieth Century-Fox) provides happy, healthy Sonja Henie, whose previous cinema roles have differed only in the hairline shadings of her skating routines, with a new medium of self-expression: clothes. Functioning as an employe of a Manhattan department store, she is sent to Plymouth University on a semiprofessional basis as a mannequin to promote the sales of winter sportswear. This device supplies most of the story motivation in My Lucky Star, since the Henie wardrobe arouses the jealousy of her less fortunate classmates. It also permits Miss Henie to model a collection of cold-weather creations which female cinemaddicts are likely to find even more eye-worthy than the tricks Miss Henie executes while wearing them. Best of the latter is an Alice in Wonderland ballet on ice.

As further advantages over other specimens of collegiate musicomedy, My Lucky Star has exterior shots of unusual charm, four new Gordon & Revel songs, an energetic young cast including Eccentric Dancer Buddy Ebsen, Richard Greene, Cesar Romero and Louise Hovick. Cinemaddicts who believe that women afflicted by facial abnormalities should try to minimize them will be less favorably impressed by a young comedienne, Joan Davis, whose employers apparently consider her a rival to Paramount's Martha Raye. Most gruesome shot: Miss Davis flattening her Durantesque nose against a windowpane.

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