The New Pictures

The FBI Story (Mervyn LeRoy; Warner) gives a fast-moving synopsis of Author Don Whitehead's bestselling account of the bureau's history and great cases, but insists on gluing it together with another rewrite of The Jimmy Stewart Story. Like the book, the film teases interest with the case of Jack Graham, the young man who in 1955 packed a time bomb into his mother's suitcase at Denver, blew up a United Air Lines DC-6B with her and 43 others aboard. Within 13 days, the FBI had solved the crime.

Then, it's back to the '20s when Agent Jimmy Stewart was "yeauk, you betcha" thinking of quitting because the bureau was neglected and disorganized, with so little office space that one criterion for moving in on a crook was: "Arrest him before his file gets too thick." But a new chief, 29-year-old John Edgar Hoover, cries "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity," and Jimmy gets the call. From then on, he is. if anything, over Fed.

The more documentary episodes are well done. The growing bureau unfrocks the Ku Klux Klan in the South, traps the murderers of oil-rich Osage Indians in Oklahoma. When the FBI finally gets authorization to carry firearms (1934) and each agent gets his first "good, conscientious, hard-working machine gun," the great names of American crime cross the screen like targets in a shooting gallery: Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, John Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly, the goon who screamed "Don't shoot, G-men," and dropped a new term into the language.

The one crime that goes unpunished is perpetrated by the other half of the script: the sentimental life story of Special Agent Jimmy Stewart. He has the usual bushel of cute kids and the usual load of heart-searing domestic troubles: a son lost at Iwo Jima, a wife (Vera Miles) who leaves him because she just cannot stand those hothead showers he takes every day. Naturally, she comes back and they end up living happily beyond their income in a mansion with lawns that slope gently to the Potomac.

The Wonderful Country (D.R.M.; United Artists) is the wonderful country of Tom Lea's novel, the borderland where the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora meet west Texas. The land is dry and pastel, with rivers that have made high mesas by washing away the weaknesses of old plains. The country is so beautiful, so savage and unspoiled, that it seems to speak out. telling man to keep a respectful distance.

That was before Actor-Producer Bob Mitchum arrived last spring with an omnium-gatherum script bulky enough to help keep Jack Oakie in pictures and also give baseball's aged Negro Pitcher Satchel Paige his Hollywood debut (as a soldier). The moviemakers clip-clopped up and down the mesas, shattered the stillness with gunfire. On the bleached bones of Everywestern they buttoned a gun duel, Apache raids, Texas Rangers, even a railroad subplot. But the result is just a crying Shane. All that is truly dramatic is the wonderful country itself.

Mitchum is an American who killed his first man at the age of 13 to avenge his father's death. He ran away to Mexico and grew up a pistolero in the service of a provincial dictator. While he says he is from Missouri, he sounds like an Aztec exchange student after six terms at C.C.N.Y. He fords the Rio Grande on a mission to the U.S. for his Chihuahuan master (Pedro Armendariz). There he breaks a leg, is forced to stay over for two months, and suddenly he is the most sought-after man in town. A U.S. Army major (Gary Merrill) wants him to help form joint U.S.-Mexican battalions to go after the Apaches, the Texas Rangers want to give him a job, and the major's estranged wife (Julie London) just wants him. Mitchum begs her not to seduce him and hurt his opportunity for a new life. Before she has a chance, Mitchum kills another villain and nervously flees to Mexico for the second time.

The rest of the plot is as snarled as a ball of tumbleweed. The major and his wife turn up in Mexico on a junket intended to promote the building of international roadbeds, and there, at a fiesta, stands Mitchum. Woofs the hero to the lady, amid the confusion of wild music and whirling skirts: "Let's get out of here." Her response: ole.

Apaches take care of the major. Mitchum takes care of the Apaches. By this time, at least 48 subplots are in sore need of resolution. Mitchum takes the only way out, crosses the Rio Grande again, leaving behind him a western that is more woolly than wild.

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