NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 95, 18 April 1941, Page 16

NORTH WEST MOUNTED POLICE

¢ Paramount )

HIS is the film to the press review of which Paramount did not see fit to invite The Listener. If they were afraid of what I might say (and it

seems they were) they had less confidence in their own product than I have, now that I have seen the show at a public screening. I can heartily endorse the sentiments of C. A. Lejeune in The Observer that North West Mounted Police is a fine, fruity melodrama which should keep the cash-register in the boxoffice ringing a merry tune. I think that Producer Cecil B. De Mille has, with this one, come nearer a true recipe for popular entertainment than for a very long time. It was a particularly shrewd bit of scenario-writing to devise a plot which not only gives Preston Foster and others the chance to uphold the honour of the Mounties and be extremely British and Imperial, but which also allows Gary Cooper to come very fully into the picture while remaining a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, a Texas Ranger who ranges into Canada to prove that the Mounties aren’t the only people who can get their man and who stays quite long enough to help the boys in red clean up the insurrection of Louis Riel and his halfbreeds in 1885. Even the fact that there is only one heroine (Madeleine Carroll) for both Messrs Foster and Cooper to love with all their manly hearts doesn’t spoil Mr. De Mille’s hands-across-the-

Canadian-frontier. theme; for’ when Mounty Foster rides off the screen with the English girl and Ranger Cooper rides off with the wicked villain, nobody in the audience is likely to be disappointed. It is one of the happiest.solutions of the eternal triangle problem that I have eéncountered. Even Cooper takes it very well, hiding his disappointment with one of his famous nonchalant smiles and a philosophic quip in a charming Texan drawl. Mr. De Mille has also shown ingenuity and diplomacy in handling the halfbreed and Indian problem. Louis Riel, for all he tried to disrupt the British Empire, is shown merely as a misguided dreamer who hated bloodshed but was led astray by wicked men; and the heap big chief of the Blackfeet Indians has enough sense to renew allegiance to the Great White Queen Across the Water before his braves have actually gone into revolt (they make a pretty exciting pretence of it, however, and only the valour .of the Paramounties wins the day). Thus the audience is left free to. vent all its hatred on George Bancroft, a_bloodyminded, no-account half-breed with a beard, who mows down Paramounties with a gattling-gun until justice catches up with him. This is one of those pictures with a cast of thousands (yes, really), so you can’t expect me to go right through the list, but I would like to say a special word for Lynne Overman, with red hair, red tam o’Shanter and a thick Scots accent; for Akim Tamiroff, a half-breed with a beard-and red underpants-but with taking ways in spite of his being on the wrong side; for Paulette Goddard, a half-Indian wildcat whose’ ways are also taking; and for Robert Preston, a Mounty who rather lets the British Empire down by deserting his post to wed the wildcat. And just a collective word

of praise for all the half-blooded halfbreeds, full-blooded Indians, and redblooded troopers whose red-bloodedness is so plainly seen when they are shot (as they frequently are). For the film, of course, is in colour. Not that you’re likely to overlook the fact. Mr. De Mille starts with a full palette (mostly red), and the woods and rivers of Canada, and the red coats and blood of the Paramounties never let him down. It’s all perhaps a trifle over-long and over-gaudy, and the dialogue smacks a bit of the Old-Time Theaytre; but I don’t think you’ll worry much about that. I didn’t-but then perhaps I’m not so hard to please as Paramount seem to think.