THE DARK COMMAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 53, 28 June 1940, Page 37

THE DARK COMMAND

(Republic) 1172 Next to comedy to take their minds off the sad fate of "homo sapiens, movie audiences to-day are demanding action. And action has always been found at its liveliest in the Western film. Republic have met this demand with a story about the outlaws of Kansas’s bad old days, and have also cashed in on the "Gone With the Wind" cycle by giving it a Civil War background,;The result is no one-horse melodrama, but a hand-somely-produced, super-Western which finds time amid its thrills of battle, musder, and sudden death to work in some colourful character-acting by Walter Pidgeon and others. Pidgeon plays the role of Cantrell (the thinly-disguised counterpart of an historical figure named Quantrell) who is a wolf in school-mas-ter’s clothing in the little Kansas town of Lawrence about 1860. The Civil War gives Cantrell the chance to obey his worst impulses: he shuts up his schoolbooks and becomes leader of a guerrilla band spreading destruction far and wide across the State. Behind all this there has to be, of course, a woman — Claire Trevor, daughter of a Southern gentleman, who perversely prefers the cleanlimbed, uneducated hero (John Wayne) to the cultured Mr. Cantrell. Most of the burning and pillaging which thereafter befalls Kansas at Cantrell’s hands is done to impress her. She is certainly impressed, but not favourably. However, when retribution at last strikes the villain it comes from an unusual quarter. His Nemesis is not the hero, but his own long-suffering mother, Majorie Main’s backache-and-kidney-pills expression, which first brought her fame in "Dead End." makes her the ideal choice for this part.