Cinema: The New Pictures: Sep. 19, 1938

Valley of the Giants (Warner Bros.), like Drums (see below), takes color completely in its stride. And its Paul Bunyanesque stride is suitable to Peter B. Kyne's famed tale of lumberjacking and land grabbing in California's redwood forests. Charles Bickford, as head of a crooked gang of Eastern lumber barons, is determined to whittle the world's oldest stand of timber down to shingle slabs. Wayne Morris, an idealistic young landowner, is committed to preserving his mortgaged title to acreage that the gang needs to complete its shocking plan. The changing sympathies of Claire Trevor, a blonde croupière, help determine the outcome of the struggle.

Valley of the Giants surrounds its heroic theme with robust climaxes as huge, numerous, tightly packed and ancient as the rings on a redwood stump. They include a free-for-all fight wherein a redheaded lumberjack named Ox (Alan Hale) demolishes a barroom singlehanded; a wrestle to the death between Bickford and Morris on the edge of a precipice; a train wreck from which hero rescues heroine by a margin narrow enough to make nervous cinemaddicts avert their eyes; a dynamite explosion, an exhibition of fly-casting, a minor log jam and a conflagration. All this action takes place to a running accompaniment of strong talk and more or less continuous gunfire.

Arrival of color photography as a standard item of Hollywood technique will be signalized only when critics give it the final seal of their approval by not mentioning it at all. Valley of the Giants is photographically far enough ahead of its time to deserve this type of accolade. Rich forest greens, the deep tones of turn-of-the-century interiors, the cheerful glow of full bottles on a well-stocked bar help immeasurably to give the picture character and substance. Its life blood, however, is a story which, although it is a throwback to silent cinema classics, has derived through them some of the heroic sweep and thunder of the West's lore of legendary foresters. Good shot: a falling redwood seen through a stationary camera sighting along the trunk of the tree as it levels with the lens.

Drums (London Film), most elaborate color film ever made by a British company, is also the British cinema industry's first major investigation of a subject which has often interested Hollywood: empire building in the north of India. Largely made on location near Chitral, Drums contains some of the most dazzling sequences ever recorded in Technicolor, but Director Zoltan Korda—wiser than many of his U. S. colleagues when confronted with this medium for the first time—refused to let it get out of hand. Consequently, his picture marches with considerably more vigor than anything his brother Alexander Korda's London Film Productions has made since The Private Life of Henry VIII, rates as the No. 1 British export of the year.