The New Pictures

The Last Hunt (MGM) is a bloodstained western that demonstrates two ways to shoot buffalo: 1) slaveringly, as villainous Hunter Robert Taylor does it, or 2) mincingly, like noble-souled Hunter

Stewart Granger. Either way the buffalo end up dead, but the fine distinction enables Producer Dore Schary to appear moralistic rather than brutal as he records the gory slaughter of bison in South Dakota's Custer State Park, where the actual killing was done by park sharpshooters in their annual thinning of the herd.

Badman Taylor tunes up for the buffalo by knocking off Indians. After wiping out a nest of Sioux, he stumbles upon toothsome Debra Paget and a papoose in the underbrush, and drags her back to camp to act as his cook. At this cavalier treatment, Debra smolders and Granger burns, but all Taylor does is sneer and menacingly crook his itchy trigger finger. However, the showdown must be deferred, since

Producer Schary still has reel on reel of bleeding buffalo to get into the picture. Besides, Debra has to clear her name. First it is revealed that the papoose is not hers--she was simply baby-sitting for a friend. Next, astonished moviegoers learn that Taylor has not been making very determined passes at the girl when they retire each night to their little hut. After absorbing these whoppers, the audience is prepared for one more anticlimax: Taylor tracks the fleeing Granger and Debra to a hillside cave, but instead of shooting them down, obligingly camps outside all night. By morning he is frozen stiff as an ice cube--even though the weather is apparently so mild that it does not raise a single goose bump on Debra's bare and dimpled knees as she rides off into the dawn in Granger's arms.

The Return of Don Camillo (Rizzoli; I.F.E.), a sequel to The Little World of Don Camillo (TIME, Jan. 19, 1953), continues the slapstick story of Fernandel, a quirky priest who talks both to and back to God. and Gino Cervi, a hot-tempered Communist mayor whose redness seems no deeper than that of a radish.

Lacking a plot, Director-Adapter Julien Duvivier has strung together an ill-assorted, 115-minute necklace of incidents--some mildly irreverent (as when Fernandel steals a favorite crucifix from his old church), some funny, some dull. As usual, the priest is better at pugilism than piety: he knocks out a professional boxer to uphold the honor of his town, and when the mayor and a local capitalist are at each other's throats, he quiets them with a bludgeon. Balanced with these feats of muscular Christianity are a pastoral interlude where Fernandel softens the mayor's stubborn son in a sequence that touches the strings of love and charity, and a less happy episode that requires the priest, the mayor and an old Fascist enemy each to down a ritual glass of castor oil.

The film's message, far more humanistic than either godly or Marxian, sounds loudest at film's end, when the town is inundated by a flood, and the depressing suggestion is advanced that only such a great natural disaster can put an end to the eternal quarrels of Communist and capitalist, priest and party hack.

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