Word: film
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Jimmy Stewart reported a steady 800 barrels a day from his No. i well, brought in at 4,180 ft. near Vernal, Utah, last fortnight. Stewart and his partners (among them: Continental Airlines' President Robert Six; Howard Hughes's ubiquitous agent, Johnny Meyer; and General Aniline & Film's Chairman Jack Frye) had risked $75,000 on a tip Meyer got from a geologist who had previously tipped Meyer and Frank Sinatra to another payoff site (Sinatra's "Crooner No. i" well in Wyoming...
Thieves' Highway (20th Century-Fox) is a flashy, second-rate film with a simple, violent story. On his first haul, a fruit trucker (Richard Conte) foils some market thieves, avenges a robbery of his father, sells his apples at a profit and gets the girl. The movie makes no pretentions to anything but entertainment; its only message, if any: think twice before going into the fruit-trucking trade. There have been better trucking movies (They Drive By Night), but none so fast or so violent. Most spectacular shot: Millard Mitchell burning alive in the remains of his rickety truck...
...Last Stop" is a film, made in Poland with Auschwitz itself for a set, telling the story of the German prosecution of 4,500,000 Poles. Of course, the picture is grim-probably more grim than any other of the war narratives; but, in the endurance and faith of the group of Polish women portrayed, even the worst of horrors are obscured. You can't leave the theater without thinking that what might have been an ordinary documentary film has been converted into an exceptionally fine drama...
Wanda Jakubowska, the director, was a prisoner at Auschwitz during the reign of terror. She saw the queues of Jewesses waiting for the crematorium, the old women left to die in the mud, and the bones of the murdered babies. From her previous experience before the war with Film Polski, she acquired the talent for realistic sets and atmosphere. The synthesis, "The Last Stop," is her masterpiece...
...Helen Drohocka, as the phlegmatic women doctor, and Wanda Bertowna, as the pretty interpreter, led the east. But the picture was a group effort, as far as the acting went, and no single performance dwarfed any of the others. Certainly from the ranks of the Polish actors in this film will come some of the top artists in the foreign film business during the next few years...