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Soldier of Fortune (20th Century-Fox) plays out its tiny melodrama against the vast, eye-filling CinemaScope backdrop of Hong Kong harbor. Incredible islands rise perpendicular from the blue sea, and fleets of fishing junks, like floating windmills, drift by on the tide. Ashore, the narrow streets are jammed with the swarming, anonymous humanity of Asia, while high up on green terraces gleam the flowered palaces of the rich.
Into this storybook East comes plucky Susan Hayward, thrusting her determined chin at consular aides, British policemen and inscrutable Chinese who do not seem sufficiently eager to drop everything and help search for her husband (Gene Barry) behind the Bamboo Curtain. As someone defensively points out, her husband—a scoop-minded magazine photographer—knew he was taking a considerable chance when he crossed the Red border without a visa and loaded down with cameras.
Distraught Susan at last turns to Clark Gable. A keen-eyed soldier of fortune who smuggles strategic goods to the Reds, Clark is more interested in releasing Susan from her inhibitions than her husband from jail. But a series of rebuffs (each time he kisses her she responds with a maidenly protest) makes him realize that this is a girl in a million—well, in a thousand. Clark determines to do the manly thing : he will produce her husband and let Susan choose between them.
Springing the prisoner is no more trouble than Hollywood usually finds it. Clark and a couple of pals simply sail up the Pearl River to Canton, sneak ashore, knock two or three Red guards on the head, open the door of precisely the right cell, and escape to freedom with the Reds chasing foolishly after them. Displaying scarcely more hesitation than a plump matron deciding between a chocolate eclair and a napoleon, Susan lets her husband —who seems glad to get away — fly back to the States, and chooses Clark as her soul mate. Their final clinch halfway up a mountainside is mercifully dwarfed by a staggeringly beautiful panorama of Hong Kong bay.
Davy Crockett (Disney; Buena Vista) has already been seen twice on TV; its theme song brays steadily from the nation's jukeboxes; coonskin hats, flintlock muskets and some 100 other Crockett-inspired products flood U.S. stores (TIME, May 23). Now at last, the film has reached movie theaters, but its belated arrival is far from an anticlimax. Technicolor and the wide screen combine to make this classic tale of derring-do bigger and better than ever. The episodic story has been shortened by 40 minutes but not changed: Davy still fights the Creek War, gets elected to Congress, dies gloriously in the Alamo. Newcomer Fess Parker plays the famed frontiersman with just the right blend of John Wayne and Herb Shriner. And Writer Tom Blackburn has invented a Crockett filled with engaging crotchets: when first encountered, Davy is deep in the piney woods taking time off from Indian-fighting to try to "grin" a bear into submission. This budding effort at psychological warfare fails, and Davy needs a knife to subdue the critter. Throughout the picture, the heroic act is never far removed from the owlish legpull: when Crockett comes prancing into Congress garbed in backwoods buckskins, neither he nor anyone else pretends that these are his idea of city clothes or that his "by-cracky" freshman speech is anything but an act.