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These Thousand Hills (20th Century-Fox). The novels of A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Big Sky) flash across the mind like fine movies. As movies, unfortunately, they sometimes mumble along like bad novels. The author writes atmosphere as naturally as nature makes weather, but his situations often owe less to the good old West than to the bad old westerns. In These Thousand Hills, Hollywood has unhappily chosen to overlook the atmosphere and underline the cliches. And so what might have been a fine piece of buckskin naturalism turns out to be just another million-dollar game of cowboys and Indians.
Guthrie's book described how the men who had won the West sat down to manage their vast estate, how the buckaroos became Babbitts. The movie reduces this process of history to a commonplace: Will success spoil Lat Evans? Lat (Don Murray) is the hero, a young wet-ear from Oregon who comes stringing into the Montana territory to make his stake. "Ah ain't afraida hard work," he tells his sidekick, jaw set. "Ah jus' doan wanna die pore." So that summer he rides trail like to burn off his backside, and the next winter he goes bounty snatching, wolves and such. But, come grass, he's still as stone-sucking pore as ever he was.
Miss Callie, though, a little cat-house kitten (Lee Remick), puts up the mortgage money, and Lat buys himself a spread. What with haystacks and hand-feeding, he weathers his stock through the big winter of 1886-87 and fattens them into a small fortune next spring. So Lat gets to be a big man in Montana, and he marries the banker's niece (Patricia Owens); but somehow the closer he gets to where he is going, the less he remembers about where he came from, and especially about where the mortgage money came from, and what sort of girl he left behind. And then one day the villain (Richard Egan) dares to raise his hand to Miss Callie.
Still, it's a pretty good fight while it lasts, and serves to dramatize the egalitarian moral of the movie: you can't keep a good man up.
The Devil Strikes At Night (Zenith International). The leaders of the Nazi Party seem to have been startled, during the spring of 1944, to discover that the state monopoly on wholesale murder had been threatened by a rugged individualist named Bruno Lüdke, a village idiot who in eleven years strangled at least 50 women, possibly as many as 100. What disturbed the government was the political implication. The allied enemies would be sure to derive considerable aid and comfort from the fact that the second most successful mass murderer of modern times was also a German. What to do with the case? The records suggest that Adolf Hitler himself supplied the answer: file and forget it. The records of the investigation were impounded. The investigators were sworn to secrecy. The murderer was quietly murdered. The Third Reich's department of justice was officially informed that Bruno Lüdke had never existed.
This sinister story is told with a good deal of cinematic skill and care by Director Robert (The Killers') Siodmak in one of the best German-made thrillers of recent years. Hannes Messemer is unpleasantly effective as a big fish in the upper depths of the Gestapo, and Mario Adorf, as he shambles in evil stupor through the horrible rote of lust and destruction, is sickeningly plausible as the killer from Koepenick.