The New Pictures

Viva Zapafa! (20th Century-Fox) is a delayed cinematic footnote to MGM's slambang Viva Villa (1934), in which Wallace Beery sweatily portrayed Mexico's bandit patriot. Villa's revolutionary ally to the south in the bloody 1911-19 uprisings was fiery Emiliano Zapata, nicknamed "the Tiger."

Viva Zapata! makes the Tiger out to be a pretty tame cat. According to history, Zapata was not only a great folk hero and agrarian emancipator, but also a cruel, cunning Guerrero Indian whose notorious Death Legion made human torches of the enemy and staked living men to anthills.

The picture shows Zapata (Marlon Brando) as a somewhat crude but noble fellow with a nice regard for the social amenities. He is also characterized as a thinker and talker, as well as a brawler. According to the movie, he is a sort of middle-of-the-road democrat who repudiates both dictators and rabid revolutionists. When the real-life Zapata wasn't busy killing his enemies, he found time to go through bogus marriage ceremonies with 26 women, only one of whom he wed legally. The film Tiger is permitted only one beauteous senorita (Jean Peters).

When John Steinbeck's screenplay is not dishing up primer politics and flabby moralizing (the unlettered bandit is made to mouth such sentiments as: "I don't want to be the conscience of the world"), Viva Zapata! is good, muscular horse opera. Director Elia Kazan has filled it with vigorous action--horsemen charging, ammunition trains being dynamited and peons fighting. Striking sequence: President Francisco Madero being shot down by the military in the glare of automobile headlights while a siren drowns out his cries.

The cast includes such acceptable Latin types as Anthony Quinn and Margo, and such less acceptable Latin types as Jean Peters. In the title role, Marlon Brando, wearing a spitcurl hairdo, drooping mustachios and cartwheel sombrero, slouches and mumbles his way through the excitement in a deadpan Brando voice.

The Las Vegas Story (RKO Radio] must have been easy for Jane Russell because she has done so many movies just like it. This time, Jane arrives in Las Vegas as the discontented wife of Vincent Price, a near-bankrupt broker who hopes to remake his fortune at the dice tables. To Jane, the visit is one long remembrance of things past, for it was in Las Vegas that she loved and left Victor Mature, a local policeman. In their big confrontation scene, Jane delicately dilates her nostrils and Victor clenches his jaw so hard that his ears wiggle, thus making it clear to the dullest moviegoer that this is an incendiary passion.

Behind these two protagonists lies a shadowy plot dealing with a diamond necklace (for which Cartier, Inc. gets a screen credit), a murder, and the inevitable chase sequence: villainous Brad Dexter, absconding in a stolen car with both Jane Russell and the jewels, as pursued and overtaken by Mature in a helicopter. Besides petulantly tossing her head at both Mature and Vincent Price, Jane sings three songs by Hoagy Carmichael, and is thoroughly photographed in bed, in a glass-walled shower, and in & out of a succession of deep-plunging evening dresses.

This Woman Is Dangerous (Warner) shows how Joan Crawford loses her eyesight and then finds true love in the antiseptic arms of the surgeon who saves her vision. The stumbling block to this romance is that Joan, as usual, has a lurid past: she is the brain, front woman and nursemaid to a pair of hysterical gunmen (David Brian and Philip Carey). What with planning robberies, quieting their tantrums and offering such motherly warnings as, "Now don't hurt anyone," as she passes out the guns, it is remarkable that she doesn't lose her mind as well as her sight.

After sticking up a New Orleans gambling den for $100,000, Joan finds that everything is going black. She heads for the eye clinic of a Hoosier Dr. Kildare (Dennis Morgan). While he is simultaneously stitching together Joan's optical nerves and surrendering his heart, her gun pals are killing cops, slugging each other and fretting about what Joan's up to. Gangster Brian, who seems to regard her with a proprietary eye, decides to go gunning for Surgeon Morgan. He comes to his destined end by crashing through the glass canopy of an operating room after being shot on the wing by the police.

Joan goes through her paces as a dangerous woman with all the familiarity of long experience, but Dennis Morgan's boyish twinkling seems oddly out of place for the greatest eye doctor in the U.S.

Bugles in the Afternoon (Warner) takes a Technicolor gallop across western prairies infested by Indians who can shoot straight only when they are not shooting at the hero. The indestructible hero is brooding Ray Milland, who has been drummed out of his regiment back east for running a saber into dastardly Hugh Marlowe. Re-enlisting at a frontier fort, he is soon squabbling with Marlowe again, this time over the affections of beauteous Helena Carter.

The tried & true background for these familiar dramatics is the Custer expedition against the Sioux that ended in the disaster of the Little Big Horn. But, even during the massacre, the film hedges on its six-shooting action and offers only a distant and muddy-colored glimpse. Based on one of Ernest Haycox's cow-country novels, Bugles is nearly as empty of content as surprises. Forrest Tucker rings a few changes on the role of a comedy Irish trooper, arid Director Roy Rowland, by repeated applications of Hollywood oil, almost manages to keep the lumbering plot from creaking too loudly.

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