PLAZA THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 157, 29 March 1941, Page 15

PLAZA THEATRE

Starring Jean Arthur, “Arizona,” now screening at the Plaza Theatre, is as good a description of the middle eighteen hundreds —with an American background—as one could wish. Filmed with a strict and unsentimental attention to detail, audiences get what might be a true picture of the wagon trains in the pioneering period as they stumble over dusty cactus country in search of a new home in a new wilderness. The wagons are covered with battered canvas, the men that guide them are dusty and tired, with week-old growths of beard and workaday clothes which have obviously stood up to many months of hard travelling. There is, in fact, no “glamour” about the trek in this production, and it is all the more credible and interesting because Of it. As the heroic frontier woman, Phoebe Titus, who, for a while, is the only Ameri--4 can woman in the restless, milling “city” of Tucson, Jean Arthur has a part which suits her like the proverbial glove. Phoebe, like the men and the wagons, also has no need of “glamour”; she wears men’s garb and deals with her troubles in a man’s way, though starting out to make her fortune in the kitchen.

Phoebe sells pies to hungry travellers at a dollar apiece. She has a dream: She wants one day to own a cattle ranch and to see the country which she has grown to love, prosper and blossom into some sort of civilization. When young Peter Muncey comes along she feels she has at last met someone with whom she can share her dream. Muncey is a fairly inarticulate lover, but both soon come to an understanding, which is threatened every now and then by the machinations of a gentlemanly crook called Carteret, and his assistant, ‘Ward. Carteret, too, has a desire to possess a ranch, but does not want to work for it—not in the way that Peter and Phoebe intend to work. He tries to obtain it by methods which are far from lawful, and in the end gains his just deserts. Phoebe and old Solomon Warner go into partnership in the freighting business, but Carteret bribes the neighbouring Indians to attack the wagons. In spite of all his ruses, however, it is Phoebe and Peter who at'-last are able to ride up to the doorway of their new ranch and see the promise of their dream taking shape in reality. Jean Arthur, as Phoebe, is at once tough and gentle, bossing the men around with that deep voice of hers one minute, and “cossetting” them the next. William Holden takes the part of Peter, and is very good. Warren William and Porter Hall play the duo in villainy.