The New Pictures

Rangers of Fortune (Paramount) is a dreamy description of three restless roustabouts who cut many a lusty caper in the Great Southwest during the '70s. One is a down-at-the-heel ex-West Pointer (Fred MacMurray), one a sharpshooting, mustachioed Mexicano (Gilbert Roland), one a leather-faced old pug (Albert Dekker). Together they perform the most prodigious cinema escapades since the wall-scaling, sword-swishing days of Douglas Fairbanks--escaping from a firing squad, terrorizing a small frontier village in Texas, erasing a horde of badmen who murdered the grandfather of a hardy little moppet (Betty Brewer) whom they chivalrously adopt.

Seasoned Director Sam Wood (Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Our Town) turns tail on his recent fragile work to make of Rangers of Fortune the most thrilling and funny movie brawl of the current Western craze. Without losing a gasp of suspense, he has fashioned his free-lance rangers into characters of such ludicrous gallantry, bravado and rough-&-tumble efficiency as to make his tale a classic parody on every horse opera ever produced. But with the technique of a master storyteller he inserts enough sex, sentiment and sock to keep his yarn well outside the bounds of buffoonery.

The centrifugal force for Director Wood's sentiment is the impudent, pug-nosed, forlorn little face of Hollywood's latest Cinderella--Betty Brewer, 13. Three years ago Betty's father, a Joplin, Mo. lead miner, lost his job, went on relief. The following year he joined the Okie parade to California, where he joined a hunger strike at the State Capitol in Sacramento. But Betty didn't like that. This is her story: "I decided we weren't gonna go on relief in Sacramento. So Ilene [her younger sister] and me worked out a plan to make some money. We figured we could sing as good as some of those people on the radio, so we started singin' on street corners. We did purty good. Then we got the idea of singin' at banquets, like the Chamber of Commerce and the gas company and all them other companies that give big feeds for the people who work for 'em. We put Sonny [her younger brother] in the business when we found they always paid a little bit more for three singers than two."

Penny-wise Betty fed her family on the proceeds, saved enough to take her sister and brother to Hollywood, where they arrived a year ago. Singing for nickels and dimes in front of the Brown Derby and Beachcombers restaurants, picking up an occasional radio job, they soon brought on their parents. In spare moments Betty made house-to-house calls soliciting carpentry for her idle father. Other times she led her trio to nearby movie studios, pestering receptionists in the front office for auditions. Last June when Director Wood heard them, he quickly signed Betty for Rangers. Betty's sincere, naive, yet strangely adult mind has made her as popular as the paymaster on the Paramount, lot, brought her a seven-year contract which now pays $100 weekly. She supports her family in a small whitewashed bunga low, responds to frequent touches by broke friends and relations. Her greatest extravagance to date is a pair of $3.98 cowboy boots which she used to wear continuously until schoolmates' jibes forced her to abandon them.

Dr. Kildare Goes Home (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Chapter Five in a home spun history of the cinema's most promising young physician. It promotes capricious young Dr. James Kildare (Lew Ayres) from intern at the Blair General Hospital to the pressing responsibilities of staff physician under gruff, snuffling, wheezy old Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore). It betroths him to Nurse Mary Lament (Laraine Day), a pretty busybody whose professional duties are principally concerned with either pampering or prodding the Blair staff. It rushes him home to the hearth of his weary, overworked doctor father, where he solves several people's problems by establishing a cooperative clinic in a neighboring small town. It leaves him fit for a host of new and exciting adventures.

M. G. M. box-office statistics force the inevitable conclusion that since Dr. Kildare Goes Home is just as diverting and professionally precise as its predecessors, it will furnish satisfactory entertainment for U. S. cinemillions. Its formula is tried & true. Like its predecessors it stems from two standard short stories about doctors by Pulp Writer Max Brand--Young Dr. Kildare and Calling Dr. Kildare--unearthed by M. G. M. script scouts in 1937. They were just what the studio needed for ailing Lionel Barrymore, who had been in and out of a wheel chair for two years with a succession of broken hips. Barrymore was cast as the cancer-ridden patriarch of the pieces while the casting department dug up Lew Ayres to play the hero. Young Dr. Kildare, the first of the series, was produced on a careful "B" picture budget of about $150,000, appeared late in 1938, paid its way with enough ease to warrant sequels.

In line with current fashions for series films, M. G. M. has kept the Kildare jobs a family affair. The same cast, the same director (Harold S. Bucquet), the same scenarists (Harry Ruskin and Willis Goldbeck) have nursed the series from its first shaky steps to its present healthy strides. Only the technical director--a young Hollywood doctor glad to make an extra $100 a week--failed to stick when movie publicity boomed his meagre practice after three films. Although Barrymore's hip is well on the mend, and he can now shuffle about without support, the studio plans to keep him in his wheel chair during future Kildares unless the medical profession discovers a plausible cure for his cinema cancer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.