Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 6, 1955

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Scripters Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart have added a minimum of embroidery to this story. As Snyder, James Cagney has his best role in years and serves it well, mounting to successive levels of exasperation with as much ease and artistry as Bix Beiderbecke ever displayed in reaching the high note on his cornet. Cameron Mitchell makes the luckless Alderman a consistent and believable hu man being as well as a clay pigeon. Those who remember the sexy serenity with which Ruth Etting handled such numbers as the title song, Everybody Loves My Baby, At Sundown, and It All Depends on You, may find Doris Day's characterization of the star both too pallid and too girl-next-door. Doris tries hard, but, like the film costumes that are supposed to represent the F. Scott Fitzgerald era, she just isn't the real thing.

The Far Horizons (Paramount). The Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Northwest in 1804 is one of the most remarkable in the history of exploration. Its two leaders took a party of some several dozen men, a woman and a child through thousands of miles of virgin wilderness inhabited by hostile tribes. At the end of three years of hazardous journeying there had been only one death in the party—from a ruptured appendix—and but one scuffle with the Indians (two redmen were killed in an attempt at horse stealing).

The very qualities that made Meriwether Lewis and William Clark great explorers—coolheadedness, caution and iron self-discipline—are precisely the ones the moviemakers have thrown out the window. The Lewis and Clark of Far Horizons (Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston) are Hollywoodized into a pair of buffoons who would have trouble finding the corner mailbox. History records that Sacajawea, the expedition's Indian interpreter, was one of the wives of a French guide and the mother of his son. Hollywood knows better: actually, she was unmarried Donna Reed, a high-fashion pulse-thumper turned out in beautifully tailored buckskins. Heston finds her a tasty dish even if her name is too much for him to master: he calls her "Janie" for short and proposes marriage. For all its duels with knives, wild Indian attacks and synthetic quarrels between the leaders. Horizons ends by creating the one effect the producers were presumably trying to avoid: unadulterated dullness.