The New Pictures

Francis Goes to West Point (Universal-International). Francis the talking mule is now attending the U.S. Military Academy, after having helped defeat the Japanese army in Burma (Francis) and parlay two dollars into $25,000 (Francis Goes to the Races). By tutoring his sidekick in algebra, biology and French, Francis helps Donald O'Connor rise from bottom man in his class of 687 to honor plebe. Francis also straightens out romantic complications between Donald and the commandant's daughter, gives the West Point salute by raising his tail, and helps the Army sink the Navy through his unparalleled football strategy and mule sense.

A lot of screenplay corn is mixed in with Francis' oats, but Francis Goes to West Point is an amusing romp because of O'Connor's clowning and Francis' gabbing (with Actor Chill Wills' hayseedy voice). At the fadeout, Francis says: "I'm off to far places, where corn is free and mules are mules." Next in the highly profitable mule series: Francis Covers the Big Town, in which Francis will help make jackasses out of Manhattan mobsters.

The Quiet Man (Argosy; Republic) is a noisily energetic movie about an American prizefighter (John Wayne) who goes to Ireland to settle down in his ancestral village. There he falls in love with red-haired hellcat Maureen O'Hara. When her bullying brother (Victor McLaglen) tries to break up their marriage, Wayne at first refuses to retaliate. But inevitably, Wayne and McLaglen tangle in a donnybrook that ranges over hill & dale, across river and through the cobbled streets of Innisfree, with half the town tagging along and with time out for a breather at Pat Cohan's pub by both combatants and spectators.

For all of John Ford's practiced direction, The Quiet Man often seems merely the most tried & true sort of movie melodrama transplanted to the ould sod. Ford's stock company of actors plays the stock tale for all it is worth: Wayne, Maureen & McLaglen as the leads, Ward Bond as a priest who loves salmon fishing, and Barry Fitzgerald as a pixyish marriage broker. But the star of the picture is the Irish countryside, lovingly photographed in Technicolor around Cong, Galway, Spiddal, Maam Valley and Lake Corrib.

Son of Paleface (Paramount) is Bob Hope playing a boastful, craven Harvard-man, who comes to the wild-West town of Sawbuck Pass to claim the fortune left by his father," a legendary Indian fighter. Hope tangles with a bandit gang which has been hijacking gold shipments under the leadership of the Torch (Jane Russell), a leggy, gun-totin' singer at the Dirty Shame saloon. Also involved are intrepid Government Agent Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger.

Hope wears long red underwear emblazoned with a huge H (for Harvard), curls up in bed with Trigger, sings a song or two with Jane, and eludes pursuing Indians in his crimson vintage Ford, which rears up on its hind wheels like a horse. Roy Rogers sings A Four-Legged Friend to Trigger, and there are brief, unbilled appearances by Cecil B. DeMille and Bing Crosby. Sample dialogue as Jane snuggles up to Hope: "You're a dear." Hope: "You're an antelope. Later on we'll go out on the range and play."

What Price Glory (20th Century-Fox) is a soft-boiled movie version of the hard-boiled Maxwell Anderson-Laurence Stallings war play of 1924. The original drama, one of the alltime greats of the American stage, was built around the rowdy feuding of Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt of the U.S. Marines. Mainly, the boys fought over Charmaine, daughter of an innkeeper in a French village. In their quieter moments, Quirt and Flagg also got around to fighting the Germans.*

This adaptation adds Technicolor, songs and slapdash comedy routines to the original. It subtracts much of the play's bawdy vitality and grim view of war. There are some over-tinted battle scenes directed by John Ford, and a rosy fadeout with both Quirt (Dan Dailey) and Flagg (James Cagney) proposing marriage to Charmaine just before the big allied push.

Corinne Calvet makes a decorative, too decorous Charmaine. As the rambunctious Flagg and Quirt, paunchy James Cagney and rangy Dan Dailey work hard snarling at each other out of the sides of their mouths, but most of the time they seem merely about to break into a song & dance routine.

* At Belleau Wood, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne, where the 5th and 6th Marines were two of the four infantry regiments in the Army's 2nd (Indianhead) Division. The 5th Marine Regiment is now a part of the 1st Marine Division in Korea, the 6th a part of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The and Army Division fights in Korea less its old Marine units.

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