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Her proposition: that Bob move in as Sanders' ghost artist while she and the cartoonist are off on their honeymoon. Additional comedy is supplied by Pearl Bailey, who doubles as narrator and songbird when she is not pretending to be Sanders' maid, as well as by a small boy (Jerry Mathers) and a large shaggy dog. With this much to go on, Hope sets about rewinning Eva Marie with all the tested ingredients of farce, from pratfalls to bedroom scenes to hurry-up exits and entrances. Everything winds up in a final bedlam as Cartoonist Sanders' apartment is being readied for a Person to Person TV interview at the same moment that Eva Marie is breaking her engagement and Hope is walking off, not only with the girl, but with the boy and dog as well. Bob breezes amiably through this pastiche, firing off salvos of one-line jokes, mugging happily, and milking his nervous stomach and faint heart for every sight gag possible. Eva Marie Saint is mostly limited to wearing high-fashion clothes and looking elegant, but, in the drunk scene, she exhibits a comedy talent of her own—especially in a Groucho-like gallop that definitely hits the Marx.
The Searchers (C. V. Whitney; Warner) is another excursion into the patented Old West of Director John Ford. The place is Texas, three years after the Civil War, and the lone figure moving across the vast plain is none other than lean, leathery, disenchanted John Wayne, still wearing bits of his Confederate uniform, still looking for trouble. Trouble finds him. One day, while John's back is turned, Chief Scar and his wild Comanches swoop down and massacre his relatives, carrying off two young girls for their own fell purposes.
Wayne promptly fills his trusty horse with hay and sets off on a fiveyear, Technicolor, VistaVision search for the girls. His itinerary sounds like that of Lewis & Clark, but the camera never seems to get outside Arizona and Utah's beautiful Monument Valley. Tagging along is Jeffrey Hunter, who spends nearly as much time trying to soften Wayne's vindictiveness as he does hunting Indians. Though the film runs for two hours, it nevertheless races through its individual scenes at so breakneck a pace that moviegoers may be uncertain just what is going on. Director Ford indulges his Homeric appetite for violence of spirit and action. Coming on the corpse of a hated Comanche, Wayne shoots out the dead man's eyes on the debatable theological principle that the Indian's blinded ghost cannot find its way to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
One of the kidnaped girls is raped by four braves and killed off early in the picture. The other (Natalie Wood), when finally found, proves to be a contented member of Chief Scar's harem. Wayne is so annoyed that he tries to shoot her dead and is only thwarted by an Indian attack.