SMOKY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 33

SMOKY

(20th Century-Fox)

,[N reviewing this film I : should perhaps begin by eating a few of the words I have just been using about Hollywood’s current

disregard of the more gentle virtues, for this at least is a thoroughly healthy, if rather naive, entertainment with even less than the customary amount of violence expected in a Western, and with not a neurosis in sight-unless it be a horse-fixation suffered by Fred MacMurray. He is a cowpuncher and horse-breaker on a _ gorgeously over-coloured ranch owned by Anne Baxter, and although momentarily distracted by tender feelings towards Miss Baxter and rather grimmer ones towards a rascally brother (Bruce Cabot), he really has no eyes or thoughts for anything except Smoky, the beautiful wild stallion. Though a good deal of the footage in this rather overlong new version of Will James’s famous novel is devoted to outdoor. scenery and the very agreeable’ singing and guitar-playing of a burly fellow called Burl Ives ("the Singing Troubadour"), the plot itself can easily be reduced to its bare essentials of man meets horse, horse meets man, man loves horse, horse loves man, man loses

horse, man finds horse, man gets girl. But this final outcome is assumed rather than explicit; for the producers, in an evident desire to please all the small boys in the audience, have cut the "love stuff’ down to an absolute minimum, even eschewing the fade-out clinch between hero and heroine. If you liked Flicka and Thunderhead, you will like this new horse-opera, and may even feel almost as sentimental about his four-footed friend as Fred MacMurray does.