The Horsemen Get a Ford

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (M-G-M), in the famous silent version of 1921, looks pretty silly today--partly because of the story, a piece of rose-in-the-teeth romanticism by Spain's Vicente Blasco-Ibanez, and partly because of Rudolph Valentino, an actor who expressed passion by bulging his eyeballs and moodily waggling his whipstock. Undaunted, M-G-M decided to risk a remake of Horsemen. With the help of Director Vincente Minnelli (Gigi), eight big-name players (Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Lukas, Yvette Mimieux, Karl Boehm, Paul Henreid) and a $6,000,000 budget, the new production manages in several respects to be even sillier than the old.

Producer Julian Blaustein has translated his tale from World War I to World War II, but too often he retains a dated atmosphere of glamour-by-gaslight. Hero Ford, a playboy from Argentina, falls pampassionately in love with Heroine Thulin, a Parisienne married to a patriotic editor. When the editor joins the Resistance, the hero realizes his duty and secretly does the same. Unaware of his decision, the heroine decides that he is merely a lightweight, and goes back to her husband. At the fade, while the violins soar among the bomb bursts, the poor misunderstood playboy dies heroically in an attempt to weaken the Wehrmacht's defenses in Normandy.

The tale is trite, the script clumsy, and the camera work grossly faked. Though the lovers wander all over Paris, the Cathedral of Notre Dame turns up in the background practically everywhere they go, almost as if it were following them around like a little dog. To conceal such defects, Director Minnelli pours on the martial music and the Metrocolor. When war is declared, the screen turns such a bright blood red that for about half an hour afterward everything looks green. And the Four Horsemen--the Biblical war, pestilence, death and conquest--gallop across the sky at intervals like a belly-clenching commercial for stomach pills.

Of the actors, only Boyer, who plays the hero's father, shows any style. Hero Ford portrays his Argentine as a sort of Fisk Tire Baby with sideburns, but in one scene his performance does achieve a certain breadth. During a colossal CinemaScope closeup, according to an excited M-G-M press release, his eyes are darn near 65 ft. apart.

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