Cinema: The New Pictures: Dec. 28, 1936

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Wild Bill takes a new trail, following one Lattimer (Charles Bickford) the sinister agent of some grafting Cabinet members who hope to sell the Cheyennes repeating rifles left over from the Civil War. Best sequence in the picture comes when Wild Bill has killed Lattimer and rounded up his gang. To pass the time until the cavalry arrives he starts a poker game. The man behind the bar, a cringing knave outstandingly played by Porter Hall finds a gun in a drawer. It takes him half the sequence to get nerve enough to shoot Bill Hickok in the back. Finally he does it.

Skillful casting and makeup has wrought a group of bit players in the opening scene into a realistic facsimile of Lincoln's Cabinet. Cinemagoers with good memory of their history books may recognize Secretary of State Seward, Secretary ot War Stanton, Attorney General Speed Postmaster General William Dennison.

Seldom has Cecil B. De Mille recaptured so successfully the sweep of panoramic action which was his hallmark in the silent days. Often his cameras, handled by four of Hollywood's topflight cinematographers, clinch the pictorial language of the plains in brief, consummate idioms: a stagecoach ribboning down the long slant of a prairie shoulder; the Cheyennes charging up a shallow river riding so evenly their ranks look like a drift of mist; braves in war paint raiding a cabin where two women are alone; a herd of buffalo, with a scout's horse among them grazing in the burnt grass.

Slalom (H. R. Sokal, Vienna) is the first full-length skiing picture with a plot to be shown in the U. S. It takes its name from the skier's term for a downhill race around obstacles. Slalom's plot runs downhill all the way, is inconsequential except as a frame for the finest skiing and skiing photography the cinema has yet displayed.

Irked when her fiancé laughs at her inability to do winter sports, the heroine .Hella Hartwich) goes to St. Moritz to learn. There she encounters two ski-larking jacks-of-all-trades (tall Walter Riml, tiny Guzzi Lantschner) who teach her to ski in the intervals when they are not clowning on skates or escaping from the local policeman. Becoming superbly skillful almost overnight, the heroine dresses as a man, shows up her fiance by beating him in the skijoring and bobsled races I hen he recognizes her, leads her astray m the slalom to a ski wedding with a dozen top-hatted ushers tail-wagging down the mountain in formation.