The New Pictures

Callaway Went Thataway (MGM] cheerfully spoofs a national institution--the oldtime movie cowboy, exhumed by TV, exalted on boxtops and enriched by millions of worshiping, gun-toting little fans. In fairness to Hopalong Cassidy, who dispatched deputies to a Hollywood screening to see if M-G-M had poisoned his waterhole, the studio adds a postscript to the film: "This picture was made in the spirit of fun and was meant in no way to detract from the wholesome influence, civic-mindedness and the many charitable contributions of Western idols of our American youth . . ."

Like Hoppy himself, Smoky Callaway becomes a TV craze on the strength of his ancient horse operas. Unlike Hoppy, Smoky in real life is an ornery cuss--a chippie-chasing roisterer on a steady diet of alcohol. What is worse, from the standpoint of Hucksters Fred MacMurray and Dorothy McGuire, Smoky has been missing for years. When their sponsor insists on meeting him, they hire a Hollywood agent (Jesse White) to follow Smoky's alcoholic spoor wherever it may lead, and bring him back alive.

Then they discover a dead ringer for Smoky in a simple, clean-living cowpoke named Stretch Barnes. The hucksters frantically try to train him how to behave before the camera and in Hollywood society. Despite his gift for social errors, e.g., hailing Clark Gable jovially as "Sam," Cowpoke Barnes successfully fools the sponsor and the kiddies. But just as the double seems thoroughly entrenched, Agent White dredges the real Smoky out of a Cuban ginmill and rushes him back to Hollywood for rehabilitation.

The plot leads inevitably to a snarl of identity between the two cowboys, both played by Howard Keel. But the picture picks up most of its fun en route, in the desperate connivance and tart wisecracks of MacMurray and McGuire, the elaborate innocence of Callaway's double, the real Smoky's talent for caching liquor so cleverly that he stays bewilderingly plastered throughout his alcoholic cure. Hopalong, however, need not call the sheriff. Callaway bares its teeth only to grin, not to bite; and it provides parents with welcome comic relief from the hoofbeats that have invaded the U.S. home.

The Light Touch (MGM) opens with a deft lesson in the art of stealing an old master's painting from a crowded Italian museum. A self-contained little thriller, from the planning to the getaway, this sequence is plotted and timed as neatly as the theft itself. It also pegs the film's picaresque hero without a wasted motion. Stewart Granger is the Raffles of art--clever, nonchalant, cynically aware that the painting is on loan from a church altar, so thoroughgoing a rascal that he not only carries on an affair with his henchman's wife but uses the husband's unwitting help to break it off when his interest flags.

But the tension of the opening sequence unwinds steadily in a dawdling intrigue of dishonor among thieves. Granger takes the painting to Tunis, where he meets silkenly villainous Art Dealer George Sanders ("You know I detest violence"), who has commissioned him to steal it. Granger tells Sanders that the painting was accidentally destroyed and proposes making forgeries instead for the wealthy collector's trade.

Granger then dupes strait-laced Artist Pier (Teresa) Angeli into making the first copy. Sanders plays along with the scheme while wisely acting on the theory that Granger plans to sell the real painting himself. Ultimately, after each double-cross has been doubled and redoubled, Scoundrel Granger is regenerated by the love of a good woman--the kind of feat that angelic Actress Angeli may be forever destined by Hollywood to perform. Ironically, Scripter-Director Richard Brooks is the author of a current novel (The Producer) in which a moviemaker grapples with a front-office demand for an ending that wrenches the hero out of character. Brooks's own movie is a stock item too artificial to pose this issue as a problem of integrity, but by wrenching Granger out of character for a happy ending, he burdens The Light Touch with its heaviest going.

The Racket (RKO Radio) is Hollywood's answer to the Kefauver crime hearings, which showed millions of TV fans that the truth is often stranger than Hollywood fiction. Not to be outdone by the truth, Producer Edmund Grainger now strikes a blow for the moviemakers by offering a big-city crime fable as outlandish as oversimplification and exaggeration can make it.

The film's mythical city (misleadingly introduced with a shot of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street) is run by an old-fashioned mobster (Robert Ryan), now quasi-respectable, in alliance with a mysterious mastermind of U.S. crime and corruption. The only honest public official in town is Police Captain Robert Mitchum, and though the crooks have had him shifted to a "quiet" district, all the picture's five killings take place in his bailiwick.

Mitchum, who owes Ryan a grudge from boyhood, finally gets his man, but not before the racketeer blows up his home, bumps off a talkative political candidate, twists the assistant state's attorney into cringing obedience and, swaggering into the police station, shoots a cop and walks away. Also present: a hard-looking nightclub thrush (Lizabeth Scott) with a heart of gold, and a reporter (Robert Hutton) who loves her at first sight.

The big brain of U.S. crime, who makes and breaks judges, prosecutors and gangland Gauleiters from a real-estate office in the middle of town, is known to the cast of The Racket only as "the Old Man." If anyone knows his name, no one mentions it, and nobody, including the audience, ever gets a look at him. The invisible Old Man gives the best performance in the trashiest major production of the year.

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