Rawhide (20th Century-Fox). Four badmen, escaped from jail, seize an isolated stagecoach station and wait for the big gold shipment to come through. They kill the stationmaster, grab his assistant (Tyrone Power) as a foil, and hold a stranded traveler (Susan Hayward) and a toddler as hostages in the belief that they are Power's wife & child.
Will Power be able to get to the pistol that he knows is lying behind the horse trough? Can he smuggle a note to the unsuspecting drivers of a stagecoach that stops briefly for a meal and a change of horses? Will Hostage Hayward lose her virtue to the leering villain (Jack Elam) who keeps a lecher's eye on her?
These cliffhanging questions, and many more like them, are designed to stretch the situation's rudimentary suspense to the limit. Scripter Dudley Nichols and Director Henry Hathaway misjudge the breaking point. Their intentions quickly grow too transparent, their maneuverings too forced and artificial. In spite of good, sun-baked photography and effective performances by Actress Hayward and Dean Jagger, as a muttering horse thief, Rawhide also suffers because the ringleader of its heavies is played by Hugh Marlowe in the correct, mellifluous accents of a good radio announcer.
Bird of Paradise (20th Century-Fox] splurges Technicolor, lush Hawaiian scenery and anthropological detail on the job of salvaging a 1912 play (and 1932 movie) about ill-starred love in Polynesia. The result is eye-filling and sometimes interesting. But quaint Hollywood customs get in the way of the South Seas folklore.
A rich young Frenchman (Louis Jourdan), fed up with Western civilization, accompanies a college friend, Polynesian Jeff Chandler, to his exotic island home. The kahuna (medicine man) puts a curse on him. A white derelict (Everett Sloane), banished to an outlying island for committing aboriginal sin, warns him that the native paradise can be hell. But Jourdan goes native, wins the friendship of the chief, Chandler's father, and the hand of the chief's daughter (Debra Paget).
Then, as it must in all sarong epics, catastrophe intrudes on the idyl. The island volcano (realistically played by Hawaii's erupting Mauna Loa) sends fiery lava streaming into the valley, and Jourdan's bride gets her orders from the kahuna to appease the gods by leaping into the angry crater.
Writer-Director Delmer Daves, who pleaded the cause of the American Apache in Broken Arrow, treats the Polynesians with the same respect. He rigs the story with their courtship and marriage customs, their rituals, superstitions, taboos. A preface labels these details as authentic, and most of them look it. The picture's anthropological approach is thus novel and sophisticated. Unfortunately, the dramatic uses to which this research has been put frequently seem as conventional and naive as the old Dorothy Lamour adventures on enchanted Pacific isles. What saps the movie's authenticity even more, and drains its big scenes of any emotional force, is Debra Paget. Her playing of the native girl never resembles anything but a cute trick in a bathing beauty contest at Hollywood High.