Warlock (20th Century-Fox) is a two-hour, $2,000,000 western with three major stars (Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn), two main heroes, two main villains, three main plots, five subplots, eight cooling corpses, and nine major outbreaks of violence. Hero No. 1 (Fonda), a sort of Good Bad Guy, is a notorious gunman who wears gold-handled Colts. The townspeople of Warlock ask him to protect them from Villain No. 1 (Tom Drake), a Bad Bad Guy with a slow sneer, a fast draw, and plenty of sneaking dry-gulchers on his payroll. Unfortunately, Hero No. 1 refuses to take the job without his sidekick. Villain No. 2 (Quinn), a G.B.G. who turns out to be a B.B.G.—the sort of lowdown skunk that makes his girl friend keep him. So the scriptwriter rings in Hero No. 2 (Widmark), a G.B.G. who develops into a G.G.G. and goes after the bad guys like a blackbird picking ticks off a cow. In the end, with the villains all gone, the heroes have nothing left to do but answer the all-important questions: 1) Who is faster on the draw? 2) Who is slower on the drawl?
It Happened to Jane (Arwin; Columbia). "Why,'' asks a small boy, gazing up into the homely face of Ernie Kovacs, "are you so mean?" Smugly lipping his expensive Havana, Kovacs simpers like a contented cigargoyle at one of the nicest things anybody has ever said to "the meanest man in the world." As such, and proud of it, Comic Kovacs turns a fairly unfunny script into a funny farce—the success story of a self-made monster.
Born on the wrong side of the tracks, Ernie is the sort of stop-at-nothing cartoon capitalist who not only moved over to the right side—he also bought the tracks. The camera discovers him, in sleek middle age, roaring it up as the beast of the board room of the Eastern & Portland Railroad, whose cringing miscellany of vice presidents is pleading with the "general," as he likes to be called, not to ruin a poor helpless widow (Doris Day) and her two small children. With surly reluctance, he consents to make a nominal restitution to the "miserable broad" for her shipment of lobsters that died on the siding because of his penny-wise policies.
The broad, with good reason, demands triple damages—and wins them from a local court. But Kovacs only leers happily around his cigar, and his lawyers inform her lawyer (Jack Lemmon): "We have the entire appellate structure of the State of Maine before us." Deciding that two can play dirty pool, the heroine slaps a writ of execution on the villain, "attaches" the next train that happens to come through town, parks it on a spur track and challenges the brute to top that. He does. He demands rent for the spur track — $1 a foot, $230 a day.