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After several reels, Gardner kisses Taylor, whereupon Taylor slaps Gardner, which seems bad manners even in frontier Texas. Follow some shooting, riding, burning, and some pallid attempts by the scriptwriters to make the whole affair into a kind of road-company Shane. When at last the end arrives, slow as an old mule across the desert, it brings the funniest movie scene in years: Taylor and Quinn shooting each other dead and dropping to the barroom floor simultaneously, like well-rehearsed ballet dancers. Ride, Vaquero! has some exciting stretches, but Anthony Quinn as the bandit provides the only glimpses of distinction; at moments he is so good that he seems to have ridden into the scene out of some other movie. As a Mexican priest, Kurt Kasznar is conscientious and effective. Miss Gardner is exquisitely bored. Taylor is Taylor. Even the Technicolor is fuzzy, but there are some fine shots of some fine horses.
Second Chance (RKO Radio) is the seventh chance 3-D has had to prove that it is here to stay. For the seventh time it has proved itself only a novel gimmick. The third dimension, however, is the least thing wrong with Second Chance, a picture with Robert Mitchum and Linda Darnell in the leading roles. According to some touching publicity releases, Bob and Linda are trying to communicate "a love story that is a pattern for faith."
It may be a spiritual light that comes into Mitchum's eyes when he gets a glom of Darnell, or then again it may only be the glare of some passing headlights. At any rate, it is fairly certain that Prizefighter Mitchum never had faith in anything but his good right hand. He loses that faith when he kills a man in the ring, and heads across the border to forget about it. There he meets Linda, for whom faith seems to be nothing more than confidence that she can keep one wiggle ahead of Jack Palance, a really frightening gunman who offers her a choice between death and a fate worse than that.
This man Palance keeps the show as well as Linda on the move. A rivet-eyed, onetime prelim fighter from the Pennsylvania coal country, Palance (né Palahnuik) gave terrifying performances in Shane and Sudden Fear, has since become the hottest heavy in Hollywood. His face alone, as thin and cruel as a rust-pitted spade, is enough to-frighten a strong man; and to make matters worse, he seems to emit hostile energy, like something left overnight in a plutonium pile.
Among the picture's other attractions, there is a strong suggestion that Bob and Linda do more than chatter about the pretty native blankets in that hotel bedroom. There is also a free tour of Cuernavaca and Taxco, two of Mexico's most beautiful cities. And finally, there is a battle royal in a busted cable car suspended thousands of feet above the Andes (the picture never makes clear what Mexicans are doing in the Andes). As the car plunges to destruction—after all the right people are rescued—a Mexican makes a remark that may fittingly serve as a caption for the whole show. It was, he says, "a beautiful disaster!"