The New Pictures

Reap the Wild Wind (Paramount) has all that money (about $1,800,000 worth) can buy: horrendous hurricanes, sailing ships to buck them; a monster squid, brave men and bold to tackle it; a dressmaker's dream of a cotillion; flora & fauna and seascapes galore; vermilion cockatoos and great red cheeses; red-coated slaves and monkeys in the rigging; rooms, houses, towns, cities, dripping with elegance and Technicolor.

What Reap hasn't got is what it takes, which money can't buy. This so-called saga of the seafaring U.S. of 1840 is seldom credible, only occasionally exciting. It has its moments (some Grade-A brawling, excellent underwater photography, an occasional astonishing set), but they are inadequate substitutes for real characters and a good story. The story itself is the successful fight of shipowners to break up a gang of salvage pirates among the Florida keys. Paulette Goddard is there, speakin' Southern and doin' her best to get a little honest salvage away from Raymond Massey, head of the highjackers and a rat, old-style. Romancing the pretty salvage wrecker around are Sea Captain John Wayne, who seems quite depressed, and Shipowner Ray Milland, who is anything but. He gets her. In the end, poor Paulette, surrounded by dead and dying salvagers, wails: "This is all my doin'."

No one but Cecil Blount De Mille could have made Reap the Wild Wind. He has been making this kind of picture, in one form or another, for the last 29 years. Its name is spectacle. He likes spectacles. So have the estimated 800,000,000 cinemaddicts who have paid some $200,000,000 to see Reap's 65 predecessors. So has Paramount, which banked most of the $55,000,000 in film rentals that have made it happy and De Mille rich.

Hollywood understands these figures, for Hollywood is still primarily interested in grosses. So is De Mille. That's why he went into the business and made his first picture (The Squaw Man) in 1913. A frustrated actor, son of successful and knowing show folk, he had already had his artistic wings clipped-by David Belasco, who purchased and took credit for a play (The Return of Peter Grimm) which De Mille wrote.

It was a permanent clipping. De Mille, almost singlehanded, bludgeoned the industry into big business, into a new knowledge of production values, and into an acceptance of stagecraft (genuine sets, etc.) -an important advance. He did this by dishing out a series of pretentious pictures which ran an enticing gamut from sex (Male and Female) and high living (Affairs of Anatol) to orgiastic uplift (The Ten Commandments). They earned him the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and a gold medal from the bathtub industry (for making cinemagoers bathroom-conscious).

Vain, shrewd, assertive, benevolent, half uplifter, half showman, at 60 De Mille is Hollywood's oldest successful movie maker. He got there by ignoring the art of motion-picture making, concentrating on expensive theatrics, and trimming his sails to the prevailing breeze. Reap is part of his latest excursion-pioneer Americana, a blend of history & hokum which has produced North West Mounted Police, Paramount's top grossing picture (about $2,500,000) of the last ten years. This calculated program has not produced one really fine motion picture, but it has long entertained the biggest segment of U.S. ticket buyers (modal age: 19).

If De Mille has a formula, beyond mere size (always colossal) and style (always his own), it is one long practiced by the rest of Hollywood. It is called "insurance." It works this way: after loading Reap with all the enticing ingredients he could think of, De Mille insured it against failure by adding the ingredients of recent successful escape pictures and doing them a bit bigger or better, plus Technicolor.

De Mille, outwardly charming and polished as an international banker, is actually a member of the fan-magazine audience that eats up his muscle-bound extravaganzas. He does all the acting for his cast on the set, and it is his performance, not theirs, that registers on the screen. Once his gift for spectacular effect was in tune with the times; today it is strictly from Dixie. But it is still boxoffice.

My Favorite Blonde (Paramount) is sun-kissed Madeleine Carroll, nut-brown as a honey bear from her recent Bahaman excursion (TIME, March 9). This time she is the favorite of Comic Bob Hope, who blissfully lets her kick him around for ten reels of good slapsticky melodrama which all concerned seem to enjoy.

Madeleine is a British spy trying to smuggle a brooch-full of vital statistics from New York City to Los Angeles. Hope is the lesser half of a three-a-day penguin roller-skating act. They meet when Madeleine chooses his dressing room for a hideout from pursuing Nazis. They get out for Hollywood together by Pullman after she has bussed him once and Percy, the penguin, has been signed for pictures.

Hope's hot & cold gaggery goes on agreeably all the way across the continent. Blonde Miss Carroll, who can act when she has to, makes a good thing out of a role which could have been adequately routine. Percy the penguin wins the pantomime honors hands down. His best scene: waddling down a Pullman aisle in his striped pajamas and matching nightcap, hot after a herring.

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