(2 of 2)
Montana Belle (RKO Radio) casts Jane Russell as the infamous lady bandit Belle Starr, "who can ride and shoot like a man." When men are not falling dead in front of Belle's six-shooters, they are swooning at her feet. She is pursued by Outlaw Bob Dalton (Scott Brady), a lesser outlaw named Mac (Forrest Tucker) and a suave professional gambler (George Brent). Belle so inflames these various characters that they get to uttering such phrases to each other as: "No man takes a woman away from me and lives." During all this, Belle, dressed in tight black spangles, manages to find time to sing such songs as The Gilded Lily and My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon.
The climax finds Belle and her gang holding up the Oklahoma territorial bank. All the bad men are shot full of holes and Belle lies wounded in Brent's arms, secure in the knowledge that he will be waiting for her after she serves her jail sentence. Helping to make this horse opera practically indistinguishable from its numerous predecessors is the presence in the cast of gravel-voiced Andy Devine as a bearded itinerant trader.
The Brave Don't Cry (Group Three; Mayer-Kingsley) is a fairly maudlin title for a lean, unsparing movie about a Scottish mine disaster. Produced by oldtime Documentary-Maker John Grierson, the picture is based on a real-life disaster in the Knockshinnock Castle Colliery in 1950. It tells of a mine cave-in and the rescue of 118 miners trapped for two days in West No. 4 section between the firedamp and a flooded pit shaft.
The simple story is told without heroics or false sentiment. It is mostly a movie of waiting and of silences at the pithead and in the pit as the rescuers work their way toward the trapped men. "There's nothing to do but wait," says one miner's wife stoically. Except for an occasional Scottish song, the picture has no musical score—only the constant sounds of ticking clocks, dripping water and heavy breathing.
In its worthy effort to avoid trumped-up melodrama, The Brave Don't Cry sometimes seems barren of drama as well. Though it does not dig into its theme as deeply as the German Kameradschaft (1931) and the British The Stars Look Down (1939), it mines its particular dramatic vein, i.e., the ennobling dignity of man's courage, with honesty and fidelity.