Cinema: The New Pictures, Jan. 7, 1952

Westward the Women (MGM) is the showmanlike saga of an 1851 trek halfway across the U.S. by 140 women, recruited to marry the lovelorn settlers of a California valley. Rancher John McIntire signs up the prospective wives for his men, lets them pick their mates from a bulletin board full of daguerreotypes. Then hard-bitten Scout Robert Taylor rides herd on the ladies on the dangerous wagon-trail to the West.

Before the trip's survivors finally become mail-order brides in a scene of titillating comic hokum, they endure an exhaustive series of acts of God, man and MGM: storms, accidents, Indian attacks, childbirth, rape, dissension, the rigors of the Rockies and the heat of Death Valley. The passengers themselves are just as varied e.g., a French girl (Denise Dareel), who puts a respectable front on a disreputable past; a salty New Englander (Hope Emerson), who spouts seafaring lingo; a frail, pregnant schoolteacher (Beverly Dennis); a muleskinning crack shot (Lenore Lonergan); an Italian immigrant (Renata Vanni) with a nine-year-old boy. In the tradition of Frank Capra, who supplied the story for Scripter Charles Schnee, Westward the Women deploys its ample stock company and wealth of incident in a highly artificial pattern designed for a maximum of humor, pathos, action and romance. The result carries little conviction, either historical or human, but it makes a slick piece of entertainment.

Rashomon* (Daiei; RKO Radio), the first Japanese film to reach Manhattan in 14 years, is an interesting cinematic curiosity, quite unlike anything produced in the West. The judges at the 1951 Venice Film Festival gave it their grand prize, and other moviegoers may also be impressed by its expert photography, fluent direction and scorching insight—in terms of peculiarly Oriental flavor—into the frailty of the human animal the world over.

A strange film even by the standards of Japan (where it drew only enough business to meet its cost of $140,000), Rashomon opens in a ruined 8th century temple, where a woodcutter and a Buddhist priest, taking shelter from a lashing rain, ponder a bewildering crime that has shaken their faith in men. As they recount the crime to a cynical passerby, flashbacks picture the testimony at the trial and four differing re-enactments of the violent incident itself.

Up to a point, the facts are undisputed: a bandit has stalked a traveling samurai and his wife through the forest, decoyed the husband, trussed him up and raped the wife in his presence. Coming on the scene afterward, the woodcutter has found the samurai dead, his goods stolen.

But how and why did the husband die? In turn, the movie gives the dramatized explanations of the arrogant bandit, the tearful widow and, through the weird incantations of a medium, the dead husband. Each of these contradictory accounts is fundamentally a lie, colored by the guilty motives of the teller. All three are exposed by a fourth version, told by the woodcutter, who turns out to have been an eyewitness to the whole incident; and even the woodcutter falsifies some of his own story to let himself off easy.