THE LADY FROM CHEYENNE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 16

THE LADY FROM CHEYENNE

(Universal)

S a mild and gently satirical fant&ia on what is a somewhat hackneyed theme, The Lady from Cheyenne may not break box-office records,

Dut it will certainly do no harm to the reputations of those concerned in its production. It’s a tale of the Mid-West in the ’sixties-or what the Mid-West might have been — starting off with a wellrigged .land auction and ending happily for everyone except the badmen who rigged the auction and tried to do the same with the civic life which mush-

roomed from the land. Public Enemy No. 1, is of course, Edward Arnold, as the ornamentally and amply waistcoated proprietor of the local saloon (there must be a saloon sinister somewhere in that fellow’s escutcheon), and the major landholder in the new town. Opposition to his rustic totalitarianism is at first headed by Frank Craven, as the local newspaper editor, a sort of homespun Doremus J essup, who demonstrates just what a free press can do, when it is free and when it chooses to do it. But when Loretta Young, as the village schoolmistress, discovers that she is on the verge of being cheated of her schoolhouse land to make a water monopoly, opposition to Mr. Arnold takes on a definitely feminist line. As a kind. of prairie Pankhurst, she carries the fight to the State legislature and, by playing Democrats off against Republicans, wangfes a women’s suffrage bill on to the Statute Book. Armed with this, she returns home, and Mr. Arnold and his bad ‘lads are appropriately dealt with by a women’s jury. The story is (if feminists don’t mind my saying so), slight and improbable. But in that respect it suits the spirit of the picture, which is rather impish, and if The Lady _From Cheyenne doesn’t quite raise gales of laughter, it does provide a-good hour and a-half of quiet amusement. Arnold, Loretta Young and Craven are good-so is Jessie Ralph, who has not always pleased me-but Robert Preston is not quite at ease. As Arnold’s lieutenant and Miss Young’s young man, he has a foot in either camp, and perhaps he can be forgiven if he feels uncomfortable and shifts from one foot to the other occasionally. Taken for all in all, it’s good family entertainment, and I would recommend it to feminists with a sense of humour (if there are any),