For Small Fry

It takes at least as great (and honorable) talent to entertain children as their elders; and if the children are well pleased, those who take them to the theater are, as a rule, nicely taken care of too--which can rarely be said of the reverse process. An excellent movie for children is the Australian-made Bush Christmas (Rank; Universal-International). A passable one is the American-made Thunder in the Valley (20th Century-Fox).

Bush Christmas is the story of four white Australian children and one black one who set out, under pretense of a short camping trip, to trail a gang of horse thieves. The youngsters follow the bad men into grand, forlorn, unpeopled mountains. They get lost; they run out of food; they lean more & more on the little black boy's irreducible good cheer and his inherent ability to fend for himself. He teaches them not only how to live off the land (fried snakes for Christmas dinner), but also how to make life a merry hell for the horse thieves. With feet bound in leaves, to make no tracks, the children do the villains out of their horses, their boots, their food, their water; they shadow their prey pitilessly in their effort to get out of the wilderness.

This little adventure story is told very simply, with a fine understanding of suspense, and with admirable candor and tact. There is a lot of good fright in it and a flickering of the frank cruelty which comes naturally to children; but there is no terror and no brutality. Chips Rafferty and his associates, one dark and dour, one crudely comic, are exactly right as a child's idea of bad men. The players are all so likable and unaffected, and the universal moods of childhood adventure are so persuasive, that young moviegoers will probably forgive even the Australian accents. They may get their stiffest thrill--and the one least easily shared by their lily-livered escorts--watching the black boy eat live grubs.

Thunder in the Valley is a remake of Bob, Son of Battle, Alfred Ollivant's children's classic about rival Scottish shepherds and their dogs. Those who remember the glorious old rip of a character actor (Music Hall Veteran Will Fyffe) and the glorious black villain of a dog in the first version (the British To the Victor, 1938) will find the new picture comparatively genteel. But its very best audience, after all, has a short memory.

Edmund Gwenn turns in a ripe performance, in the Fyffe role, as a drunken, bragging Scottish father; there are some memorable Technicolored registrations of solemn night skies and sullen landscapes; and the sequences in which the competing dogs work their sheep have a silent, lovely concentration on pure skill that makes the rest of the picture worth idling through. Thunder in the Valley is no Lassie and certainly no To the Victor, but it is a pleasant, gentle retelling of a fine old story.

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