The New Pictures

Riding High (Paramount). When famous novelists or playwrights begin to find their ideas flagging, they are usually reduced to mooning wistfully over their early triumphs. But a famous moviemaker in the same plight can simply dig out an old success and do it all over again. Producer-Director Frank Capra has done just that in this remake of his 1934 hit, Broadway Bill. With basically the same Robert Riskin script, at least seven character actors playing their original roles and Capra repeating his crafty directorial touches, the new movie is as beautifully turned a piece of hokum as the old one.

What makes Riding High even better entertainment is the casting of a guileful, effortless Bing Crosby in the old Warner Baxter role of a happy-go-lucky racehorse owner--a part which fits Horse-Fancier Crosby as comfortably as the old clothes it gives him to wear. He rebels against the efforts of his fiancee and her moneybags father to imprison him in a job as the head of a paper box factory. Then, with the help of his fiancee's younger sister (who loves him from the start) and a colorful assortment of race-track characters, he scrounges enough cash to turn a long shot into a Derby winner.

For the most part, Capra clings so faithfully to Broadway Bill that in one sequence he appears to have lifted scenes bodily out of the old picture without bothering to reshoot them. Among the performers playing a return engagement: Raymond Walburn as a gentlemanly tout, Clarence Muse as a trainer, Douglas Dumbrille as a big-time gambler, Frankie Darro as a crooked jockey. As extra dividends, Capra has plumped out the cast with some new players who are a match for them, especially William Demarest, who plays Walburn's sidekick, Charles Bickford as a dyspeptic millionaire, Percy Kilbride as a hayseed, and Coleen Gray, who makes a refreshingly natural heroine.

Though the material is unabashedly artificial and sentimental, Riding High is still probably the most shrewdly effective show ever put together about horse racing. It is a smooth combination of comedy and pathos, romance and excitement, plus some pleasant Crosby crooning (notably, Let's Bake a Sunshine Cake). Like all Capra pictures, it is also calculated to delight the largest possible audience by taking potshots at the greedy and the pompous, while letting the meek inherit the earth.

The Reformer and the Redhead

(MGM) is a patchwork comedy with some time-tested, surefire slapstick sequences involving lions on the loose. These scenes, dragged in by the heels and worked to the bone, help to bolster a film whose authors apparently never rejected any gag that popped into their heads.

The reformer (Dick Powell) is a cynical young office-seeker posing as an advocate of good government but willing to make a deal with a shady political boss (Ray Collins). The redhead (June Allyson) is the zookeeper's daughter, a naive hothead who is ardently humane to the wild animals that her father takes home whenever they need a rest cure. When Boss Collins gets her father unjustly fired, June appeals to Powell for help, takes a hand in his mayoralty campaign, and finally reforms him into a real reformer, and, presumably, an ideal husband.

Scripted, produced and directed by the team of Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, the picture is pretty tame both as romantic comedy and lunging political burlesque. Most of its laughs grow out of Powell's encounters with June's pets, notably a weak-willed lion named Herman. Terrified in his first meeting with Herman in the heroine's living room, Powell cringes behind the furniture until he finally gets enough spunk to shoo the beast away. That sets up a scene in which he tries to browbeat an ornery lion in the back seat of his convertible, in the mistaken belief that he is dealing with Herman.

The film makes such skilled comedy performers as Broadway's David Wayne and Robert Keith try to do too much with too little, but it has a fresh minor role for an owlish young newcomer named Marvin Kaplan. As an overeducated. underpaid law clerk who is always ready to believe the worst, Kaplan shrugs his way through a scene-stealing performance.

Captain Carey, U.S.A.

(Paramount) presents Alan Ladd as his fans like him best: the heroic embodiment of both the irresistible force and the immovable object. Less infatuated moviegoers will find Ladd and the picture slow-moving and easy to resist. Played among Hollywood back-lot sets poorly disguised as Italy, the film is a whodunit so cluttered with obscure plotting and false clues that the spectator begins to wonder who cares.

As an ex-captain of the OSS, Ladd returns to an Italian village to stalk the informer who betrayed him and two wartime comrades to the Germans. One of the victims, a young Italian countess (Wanda Hendrix) who had been in love with Ladd, turns up not only alive but married to Francis Lederer, a suave nobleman with padded shoulders. As if this were not enough to frustrate a hero, Ladd also runs into the stone-throwing hostility of the whole community, which blames his wartime mission for the death of 27 hostages at the hands of the Germans. To make matters worse, while oily characters slink suspiciously in the background, Ladd succeeds in getting himself accused of a brand-new murder.

With the studied casualness of his own dangling forelock, Ladd takes it all in stride. Having already played an Italian noblewoman in Prince of Foxes, Actress Hendrix seems well on the way to being a victim of type-miscasting, but she does allow Ladd's bobby-soxer admirers to identify themselves wholeheartedly with the heroine.

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