The New Pictures

Conspirator (M-G-M). The Sally Benson script, based on the Humphrey Slater novel, is more a study of stupidity than treason. Robert Taylor, a wooden-faced major in a British Guards regiment, has been a Red agent since he was 15, apparently because he enjoyed his conspiratorial adolescence in Ireland. He breaks party discipline by marrying Elizabeth Taylor, an American visitor to London, who is portrayed as vain, vapid and addicted to double-takes. Since even his addlepated wife soon catches on that he is a traitor, the party orders Robert to kill her. On a duck hunt, he empties a shotgun at Elizabeth from a distance of ten paces--but misses. Abandoned by the party, with Scotland Yard and Army Intelligence closing in, he is more successful when he tries suicide.

In what is hailed as her first "adult" movie role, 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor reveals several outstanding attributes of a beautiful woman, but few of an actress. Robert Taylor indicates inner turmoil by staring raptly off into space. Good & evil are contrasted when the two of them come upon a rabbit in a trap: Elizabeth weeps and Robert can't understand why. "It's only a rabbit," he says. Despite expert photography and the best of intentions, the film Conspirator, pale shadow of a good novel, never comes to grips with its subject, ends as neither fish, fowl nor good Red herring.

The Sundowners (Eagle-Lion) is a better-than-routine Technicolored western. Its chief claim to note: it gives his first movie role to John Barrymore Jr., 17, son of the late Great Profile and silent screen beauty Dolores Costello. In a minor part as Jeff Cloud, kid brother of Hero Tom Cloud (Robert Sterling), young John plays with restraint and frequently bears a striking likeness, both in full-face and profile, to his famous father. But his features are too finely chiseled and his acting too low-keyed for all the blood & thunder that goes on in The Sundowners or any other formula horse opera. What he seems to need to show whether he can act--and what Hollywood will probably eventually give him--is a role as a brooding, thin-skinned young man being mistreated by some such screen hussy as Bette Davis.

The Sundowners, mostly shot in the spectacular wide-open spaces around Amarillo and Canyon, Texas, spins a conventional story in scenes that are not too incredible: Sterling and young Barrymore are trying to run an honest ranch, but the cattle rustlers won't let them. Out of the West rides their long-lost black sheep brother, Kid Wichita (Robert Preston), a killer with an all-round mean reputation. Before law & order can be restored, various good & bad actors are plugged through the heart, shot in the back, or, like Barrymore, simply wounded. The girl (Cathy Downs) suffers through every bit of it.

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