Challenge the Wilderness

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Pete Dailey: My name is Pete Dailey. I'm not in the movie business, but I often write about it. I'm the west coast editor of McCall's magazine. During my many years in Hollywood, I have seen some mighty spectacular scenes in outdoor adventure pictures: the Indian massacre of "Northwest Passage"; the tidal wave of "Green Dolphin Street"; and the wild animal stampede of "King Solomon's Mines".In my opinion, MGM's new picture "Westward the Women" is in the same thrilling tradition. The have broken new ground once more by telling the story of the daring pioneer women in the wild, uncharted west. To the men at MGM this project was more than a challenge. Making this picture was big business. An entire studio was moved to a distant, authentic location, where a frontier town was built, and hundreds of people fed, sheltered, and provided for. Many months of research were spent before all the departments were given the go-ahead to reproduce the atmosphere of this rugged, romantic era, in a vast, wild country, where the only stars were those in the sky, the only stage, that provided by nature herself. Because of the immense amount of interest aroused in Hollywood by this western epic, with an almost exclusively female cast, I thought a woman should go directly to the scene of the action and report on this fabulous story. She did. And this is her story.