Cinema: 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-Ibañez, 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...