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The Indian Fighter (Bryna; United Artists). "Decline in creative power," said Historian Oswald (The Decline of the West) Spengler, is "most obvious [in] the taste for the gigantic." If this dictum is true, the moviegoer of recent years has been seeing the sharp decline of the western. Gone is love's old sweet story of strong, silent him and dimity her. In its place the studios are offering enormous spectacles on the wide screen—galumphing travesties of the traditional horse opera—in which the lusty heroes now wrestle biddies as well as baddies, and the heroines are as likely to end up in the bushes as in front of a preacher.
The Indian Fighter, first production of an independent company formed by Actor Kirk Douglas, is one of the more successful of Hollywood's current attempts to sow a wild oater. The picture begins with a closeup shot of a shapely Indian girl (Elsa Martinelli) undressing by the side of a forest stream. After a while a paleface (Kirk Douglas) moseys by, and the two of them engage in some water play. By the time Actor Douglas gets out of the drink, he is really in the Siouxp. Old Red Cloud is attacking the fort.
Dust screens rise before the attacking tribesmen, mobile artillery lobs fireballs at the wooden stockade, and at the climactic moment an improvised land torpedo demolishes a corner of the fort. The siege is superlatively picturesque, and so is almost everything else that Cameraman "Wilfrid Cline has trained his lens on. Some spectators, though, may be mildly startled at the final fade, in which the lovers are back in the water again, drifting sensuously downstream together with nothing on as they laugh derisively at the wagon train that rolls sturdily past them on its way to the coast. Somehow, it just doesn't seem to be the spirit that won the West.
Naked Sea (RKO Radio). Any simpleton knows how to get tuna out of a can, but it takes a special sort of chucklehead to get it out of the ocean. Anybody who sees this picture, made by Allen H. Miner and Gerald Schnitzer on a West Coast tuna clipper, will soon see why. He will also see a handsome piece of movie journalism, and so many fish that when he describes the catch his wife will hurry to fix him a cup of black coffee.
The film begins as the clipper sets out to sea. First off, the crew must "scoop" for "chum," i.e., make a haul for anchovetas, to be used for bait. When at last the net makes a full purse, the ship heads for fishing grounds. A few days later, the porpoise shoal and the water birds fluster wildly overhead—the signs of tuna below.
The clipper races in, the chum begins to fly. The high-booted fishermen stand precariously in shallow metal scuppers that hang like balconies over the water, and they wield stout poles from which dangle a short line and a large bare hook. The tuna flash up to take the chum, and many get a hook instead. In hook, out fish, in hook, out fish—the work falls quickly into a pounding rhythm that maddens the blood like drums. The deck-holes are filling fast with 20-pounders that flail like thunder as the blood-mist steams above their thousand throes. The run stops as suddenly as it began. A storm is rising, and the fish go down.