Cinema: The New Pictures, Apr. 11, 1960

The Unforgiven (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster; United Artists) is a massive and masterful attempt to gild the oat. The picture runs for two hours and seven minutes and cost $5,500,000, even though most of it was filmed in what Hollywood's cost accountants call the "budget badlands" of central Mexico. It presents two major stars (Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn) and an outsize posse of featured players (Audie Murphy, Charles Bickford, Lillian Gish, John Saxon, Albert Salmi, June Walker, Joseph Wiseman). It was directed by John Huston, whose Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the best westerns ever made, and it was shot from a script by Ben (The Asphalt Jungle) Maddow that seizes a timely and heroic theme, the struggle between human feeling and race prejudice, and develops it in epic rhythms and with epic force.

The struggle is set in the dusty barrens of the Panhandle a few years after the Civil War. An old range-runner (Wiseman), mad with grief and battles, spreads a sinister story that a dark-skinned girl (Hepburn) adopted by the long-dead father of the rancher-hero (Lancaster) is really a "red-hide whelp," a papoose the father rescued from a massacre of Kiowas. The hero asks his mother (Gish) if the tale is true. He is shattered when she says it is. Nevertheless, even though he hates Indians as only a man can whose father has been killed by them, he defends the little "red Niggah" against the Kiowas, who fight to get her back; against the other ranchmen, who want to throw her as a sop to the raiding tribesmen; against his own brother (Murphy), whose love for his adopted sister is dissolved in hatred of her race; and even against herself, when she tries to go back to her people. Sexual love and physical violence somewhat confuse the racial issue, but the sex is interpreted with grace and dignity, and the violence with plenty of the old gee-whiz.

Director Huston is in fact at the top of his form as an entertainer in the grandstand manner. Unfortunately, he has tried to be more than an entertainer. The Unforgiven is designed and executed as a heroic poem, a sort of cow-country Cid. Its pace is slow and noble. Its frames are often stark tableaux. Its characters are simplified and enlarged into figures for a legend. But the legend, like most synthetic folklore, fails to come alive. How could it when the sod hut looks like a page from HOUSE & HOME, when the back-country heroine has an elocution-school accent, when the cowpunching hero has clean, executive hands? Mankind needs new and vital legends, and Director Huston should not be blamed for trying to make one. Only for trying to fake one.

Tall Story (Mansfield Productions; Warner), as a hit comedy (TIME, Feb. 9, 1959) written for Broadway by Howard Lindsay and Russel Grouse, was constructed on the principle of the basketball. A variety of vapid college humors were compressed into an airtight container of cynical wit laced up with some penetrating moral strictures. Joshua Logan, who produced and directed this film version of the play, has managed with singular skill to peel off the wit and the penetrating remarks. What is left is rather difficult to describe, but it sure doesn't have much bounce.