Santa Fe Trail (Warner) is one of those vast panoramas of an epoch on whose details Hollywood cameras love to dwell. It begins in 1854 with graduation ceremonies at West Point, shows Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis addressing the graduating class. Then it moves west, watches seven of the Class of 1854 patrolling the vast reaches of the frontier from their post at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Among the seven are George Custer (Ronald Reagan), Phil Sheridan, James Longstreet. George Pickett and J. E. B. Stuart (Enrol Flynn), a handsome lad from Virginia.
The dangerous duty of the septet is to mop up John Brown (Raymond Massey) and his followers, then engaged in smuggling slaves out of the South. On this peg is hung a moving and tragic theme: that these friends, fighting side by side, are innocently feeding a flame which will soon surround them, find them enemies in an irrepressible conflict. With the help of Director Michael Curtiz' well-tempered direction and Massey's passionate interpretation of Zealot Brown. Santa Fe Trail, in spite of its hackneyed romance, becomes a brilliant and grim account of the Civil War background.
When Charles Einfeld, Harry Brand and Russell Birdwell uttered their first infant cries, little did their mothers realize the distance those childish voices would one day reach. For Charlie, Harry and Russell have since grown into the foremost trumpeters of Hollywood's bizarre and boisterous activities. They are publicity men. It is their job to keep the world aware of movies, beglamored about movie stars, and thus herd in admissions to the box office.
Charlie, Harry, Russell & Co. have done the job so well that Hollywood is now considered the third largest news source in the U. S. More than 400 reporters, from matter-of-fact A. P. to Paul-Prying fan magazines, now scavenge Hollywood for tidbits to feed millions of readers. To keep them happy, Hollywood studios maintain vast publicity departments filled with smooth-writing ex-reporters, quick-smiling "contact men," expert photographers, menial flunkeys.
Lots of people can run a publicity department, but it takes a peculiar man to think up ideas. Charlie, Harry and Russell are primarily idea men—each with a different approach.
Russell Birdwell, most spectacular of the three, is a fox-faced, natty fellow with a thin mustache and a strange accent modeled after the English. Two years ago, Birdwell left his job as head of Selznick International's publicity department to set up shop for himself. Three pretty secretaries guard his locked inner office, where he works long & hard creating gags for Selznick (whose account he still handles) and a number of individual actors like Carole Lombard, who are willing to pay as much as $25,000 a year to keep their names conspicuous.