The New Pictures

A Lion Is in the Streets (William Cagney; Warner) follows the jaunty rise of Jimmy Cagney from a backwoods peddler of kitchenware to his near triumph as a statewide peddler of political buncombe.

Based on Adria Locke Langley's 1945 bestseller, the film is laid in an unspecified "cotton-growing state" that is readily identifiable as Huey Long's Louisiana. Demagogue Cagney, married to a Yankee schoolteacher (Barbara Hale) and deep in an affair on the side with a swamp siren (Anne Francis), mounts the first rung of the political ladder by accusing a wealthy cotton-ginner of short-weighting the local farmers. When one of his followers kills a deputy and is shot, in turn, while awaiting trial, Cagney grabs headlines by haling the dying man into court and insisting that the trial be held.

Raoul Walsh's direction keeps the film moving briskly and Cagney dominates the film in the grand manner of the 19305, when he was Hollywood's top tough-guy star. Though he looks and sounds far more Broadway than Deep South, he is thoroughly persuasive as a fast-talking politico equally able to bamboozle a backwoods crowd or to make a deal with big-city gangsters. Good shot: Cagney's shrewd mixture of friendliness and contempt as he joshes his neighbors into turning a broken-down house into a honeymoon cottage for himself and his bride.

Little Boy Lost (Paramount). Bing Crosby, a seasoned performer who learned his footwork as second baseman for the Spokane Ideal Laundry's semi-pro team, has a startling way of turning up in unexpected places. Moviegoers who are used to Bing as a crooner and a light comedian may be startled to find him in this poignant tale about frustrated fatherhood.

Little Boy Lost, based on Marghanita Laski's bestselling novel, is about a U.S. war correspondent who is forced by the German advance to flee through Dunkirk, leaving his wife and newborn son in Paris. The wife is tortured and killed by the Gestapo. When peace comes, the correspondent goes back to look for his son. At an orphanage near Paris, he finds a French boy, about seven years old, who may or may not be his son. The picture tells the story of the father's outward attempts to determine whether the boy is or is not his, and of the inward struggle he endures in the process. The experience matures him and frees him from the dead past.

In structure, the film has serious faults. It begins so slowly that for a while audiences can almost imagine that there is trouble with the projector. Even as the emotional rhythm catches hold, the mood is continually jolted by meaningless digressions. Nonetheless, there are several scenes which draw their moral beauty to a point that pierces like anguish. There is the moment on the train when the father gives the boy his first present; the boy stares at it, his eyes immense with wonder; the father urges him to open it; the boy says simply, "I do aot care what is in it." There is, again, a moment of spiritual torture when the father, driving himself to prove that the boy is in fact his son, catches the boy lying because he already loves the man and wants to stay with him. The crash of a child's hopes in silence is a more dreadful noise than anyone ever expected to hear in a Crosby picture.

As the father, Bing plays it careful and a little close. He has never pretended to be an expert actor, but his pleasantly relaxed personality and obvious sincerity serve him well. Even when his lines are read without all the emotion they call for, Bing somehow remains true to the spirit of the film. As the boy, ten-year-old Christian Fourcade, a French child actor with, happily, no suggestion of the professional about him, has the delicate, transient quality of a sprite face seen out of the corner of the eye; looked at directly, his charm dissolves. But he is the kind of child every motherly woman immediately wants to put an extra sweater on, and he is well directed (by George Seaton) to make the most of this quality without making too much of it.

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