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As in Ramona (see above) the villains are land-grabbers. This time they are silk-breeched Colonial Virginians who legislate an act appropriating the Kentucky land which the great Boone appropriated from the Indians. With 40 families at his buck skin back, Boone treks over the Cumberlands, founds the village of Boonesborough. The land is as fertile as the Red skins are hostile. Stout Boone protects the settlers in many a brush with Indians, kills more than one warrior, narrowly misses death a dozen times, is once captured by Shawnees, escaping in time to render great service to beleaguered Boonesborough. This is the best sequence in the picture. On fire after a nine-day siege by Indians and renegade whites, Boone's stockade is saved by a heavy rain—a deed of Providence so terrifying to the superstitious braves that they quit fighting. When the Virginia knaves have stolen with a legal writ the acres that defied the tomahawk, Boone and his men, Kentuckians now, turn to the trail again, westward into a waiting continent.
Pleased with Daniel Boone, Producer George A. Hirliman commissioned Screenwriter Edgecumb Pinchon to write two more scenarios based on school-book lore: one with Sam Houston as hero, one with Davy Crockett.
La Kermesse Héroïque (Tobis). When a Spanish messenger gallops into the Flemish town of Boom one morning in 1616 to announce that the Duke of Olivares and his battalion plan to spend the night there, the Mayor and the Board of Aldermen are scared out of their wits. Foreseeing a repetition of the bloody invasion of Antwerp, the Mayor suggests a ruse: he will pretend to be dead and the Aldermen, mourning at his bier, will be spared the necessity of resisting the intruders. When the Spaniards arrive, the men of Boom—except a young painter named Peter Breughel, in love with the Mayor's daughter—are nowhere in sight, but Boom's ladies, disgusted with their chicken-hearted husbands, are waiting outside the gates. They present their guests with the key to the city, and that night, while the Mayor writhes in impotent fury, the Duke, his hungry friar, his lecherous little dwarf and all his soldiers are royally entertained. Next morning, the strangers troop away across the plains and Boom's burghers come out to face their wives. The Mayor's wife makes a generous speech giving him the credit for saving the town from the horrors of a siege. He notices around her neck a magnificent new string of pearls.
Directed by Jacques Feyder, who will make Marlene Dietrich's forthcoming Knight Without: Armor for Alexander Korda,La Kermesse Héroïque explodes the theory that Rene Clair has a monopoly on urbane comedy in the French cinema. It is as sly a farce as any that has ever led a U. S. censor board to mistake good manners for innocent intentions. Produced at a cost of $850,000—fabulous for a French cinema—and magnificently set by Lazare Meerson, it was distinguished abroad by winning the grand Prix du Cinema Français, being banned in England and Holland. Released as Carnival In Flanders, with English subtitles to explain its French dialog, it last week served as the opening attraction at Manhattan's new Filmarte Theatre, the city's fifth cinemansion dedicated to a policy of showing "outstanding foreign films."