The New Pictures

Chicago Deadline (Paramount) is a lagging, maudlin movie with a tricky plot that never quite gets untangled. A sentimental reporter (Alan Ladd) who finds a pretty corpse in a cheap hotel is moved to track down the people in her fat address book and find out how she came to her sordid end. After Reporter Ladd finally "winds up the case," there are at least two unexplained murders and a heroine whose life story is still pretty much of a mystery. The journalistic technique constantly threatens to make the movie a good study of sleazy big-city life, but the story bogs down under the weight of flashbacks, synthetic mobsters and Gallup poll detection methods.

The anti-male message--that the city is a jungle of ravening wolves--is hackneyed, but the heroine (Donna Reed) is original and haunting: she is a sweet girl who simply wanders changelessly and sadly through assorted jobs, cities, and love affairs. All that Ladd manages to discover is that she was a much-dated girl who always remembered to bake a birthday cake for her brother. Also, it seems that she took up with almost anybody who made a pass at her because she "felt sorry for people."

The dialogue is mostly stock gangster talk, and the actors, generally accenting the wrong words, throw their eyes around as though they were at a tennis match. All the same, the film has moments of hard cynicism. The credibly forlorn scenes between the heroine and her brother (Arthur Kennedy) barely suggest a relationship that the Johnston Office might have scrutinized more closely. And Ladd's scenes with a cold and seedy blonde (June Havoc) show a consistent disconcern with what Hollywood knows as real love. Trying for and missing the punch of Double Indemnity, waltz-paced Deadline is further debilitated by Ladd's paralyzed imitation of Alan Ladd.

The Big Wheel (United Artists) is a racing-car movie, and its cyclonic energy and pace are likely to leave audiences with dust in their eyes. As a chesty, first-year driver, Mickey Rooney burns up the racing circuit from Culver City to Indianapolis. Gripping the steering wheel with a fearful, downward thrust as though trying to keep the car on the ground, he never drives a dull race. He always wins, crashes, hurtles the wall, or narrowly misses burning to death. The movie falls short of the 1932 speedway saga called The Crowd Roars. But obstreperous acting, grease-textured photography, and endless clips from newsreel racing shots give it a sort of juvenile vigor.

The screenplay leaves nothing behind in its tour through the junkyard of old sports movies. When Rooney starts working in Thomas Mitchell's garage, that pulp-story fixture, the star driver with the mean streak, turns up every few minutes to trade bogus-looking punches with him. Some good dirt track races go sour because the drivers must constantly snarl, wave and shake their fists at each other. After winning a few big races, visualized with the weary device of flashing sports pages on the screen, Rooney's head swells, he hits the bottle, is ostracized for crashing into his buddy, and then travels the rest of the familiar road to his comeback at Indianapolis.

Director Edward Ludwig has pumped considerable vitality into this old story and has captured some of the thunder of the speedways. Enjoying an actor's field day, Mickey Rooney performs in a noisy vaudeville style that is both impressive and irritating. On occasion, he can act with both head and heart. Best shot: a close-up of Champion Race Driver Bill Holland, whose delicate grasp of the wheel and almost pious manner are a startling contrast to Rooney's flamboyance.

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