New Picture
Canyon Passage (Walter Wanger-Universal). Feeling harried? Overworked? Jittery about the Bomb or the price of butter? Try Canyon Passage for quick, temporary relief. Unlike bridge, alcohol, the ponies and other popular forms of escape, this brilliantly engineered movie is iion-habit-forming and has no nagging aftereffects.
Back in pioneer Oregon of 1856--ah, those were the days!--life was chock-full of excitement: barroom brawling, gunplay, gold prospecting, gambling, whizzing tommyhawks and flaming arrows, sudden romance and sudden death. Canyon Passage has all this and more--plus better-than-average dialogue and competent players (Dana Andrews, Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy, Britain's Patricia Roc). Gnome-faced Hoagy Carmichael wanders lazily through the busy plot, picking his mandolin and singing four catchy, near-frontier ballads that he composed for the occasion. Technicolor works pure magic with the ires, the fist fights, trie Redmen, the pretty girls, the superb outdoor scenery.
Producer Walter Wanger and Director Jacques Tourneur have turned Ernest Haycox' slick, colorful, romantic Satevepost serial into a slick, colorful, romantic movie. If life in the old West was not really as much fun as this picture makes out, history is clearly at fault.
CURRENT & CHOICE
Easy to Wed. Van Johnson, egged on by Lucille Ball, Esther Williams and Keenan Wynn, sings, dances and takes pratfalls (TIME, July 15).
Smoky. Expert Technicolor treatment of the Will James story, starring Fred MacMurray and a piece of beautiful, black horseflesh (TIME, July 8).
Anna and the King of Slam. Lively period piece in which Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison prove that boy-gets-girl is lot the only kind of movie fun (TIME, fune 24).
The Stranger. Orson Welles directs and stars in a cunning conspiracy to scare the daylights out of folks (TIME, June 17).
Henry V. Laurence Olivier's beautiful production of Shakespeare's play (TIME, April 8).
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