The New Pictures

Colorado Territory (Warner) sets long-legged Joel McCrea to work on an old plot in a handsome new location. This time McCrea is an outlawed train robber with a price on his head and the hope in his heart of becoming a simple rancher. Like many a sagebrush Robin Hood, McCrea is bad only because he is good. He stakes a couple of settlers (Dorothy Malone and Henry Hull) to the cost of a new well, and, to feather the nest of a sick buddy, agrees to stick up just one more train. As helpers, he has a gang of really bad men, who try to doublecross him, and he has the single-minded love of a dingily blonde half-breed (Virginia Mayo).

To offset its staleness, Territory has several passages of refreshing cinematic excitement. The train robbery has a pleasant flavor of old-style westerns. For admirers of the great outdoors, the shots of McCrea's flyspeck flight across a stupendous cliff face are alone worth the price of admission.

The Judge Steps Out (RKO Radio) is a smug little film with a dubious message. Escapism, it preaches--some 90 million U.S. moviegoers notwithstanding -- does not pay. To prove its point it describes the case of a middle-aged Boston judge (Alexander Knox) who decides one day to "run for his life." Behind him he leaves the responsibilities of his office, a selfish wife and daughter, and the threat of stomach ulcers.

For a moment it looks as if Judge Knox is going to have some fun kidding the picture's moral. Instead, he falls earnestly in love with a pert little war widow (Ann Sothern) who gives him a job in her roadside restaurant. After several reels of platonic romance and irresponsibility, the lotus-eating judge remembers that he is a married man and boards a train for Boston, intending to get a divorce. But by this time it is clear that he is actually going to resume the duties of a responsible citizen.

Alexander Knox gives a skillful and appealing performance. But most moviegoers, slouched down in the dark of their favorite dream emporium, are not likely to go for the lesson he tries to teach. Coming out of Hollywood, prime spinner of myths, it will seem a piece of light-hearted hypocrisy.

Tulsa (Walter Wanger; Eagle Lion), like a damp fuse, provides a loud bang at the end of a long splutter. Its plot is so rambling and logy with cliches that its climax--a big fire scene--seems wonderfully good.

The girl who gets rescued from the fire, and who indirectly caused it, is Susan Hayward. Pretty enough to spark all sorts of explosions, Susan gets this one under way by vowing vengeance on a local oil baron (Lloyd Gough) whom she holds responsible for the death of her father. While trying to beat him at his own game, she succeeds in developing oil wells by the dozen, and presently finds that her lust for vengeance has turned into a lust for money and power. Meanwhile, her emotional life develops a three-way split between her loyalty to a rich Indian suitor (Pedro Armendariz), her love for her young geologist partner (Robert Preston), and her new-found infatuation for Oilman Gough.

After sloshing about for several reels in this improbable romantic triangle, Tulsa gets around to its real excuse for being: the roaring, crashing, supercolossal fire in the oilfields which brings Susan to her senses and Robert Preston to the rescue. No special treat for normal moviegoers, Tulsa is unmistakably a must for all firebugs.

Johnny Allegro (Columbia). For years, Hollywood has been concocting improbable scripts for the minor talents of George Raft. This one, more bizarre than most, casts him as a florist who becomes the target for a bow & arrow killer.

Raft, whose natural deadpan registers not the slightest difference between one script and the next, takes these exotic frills in his usual dapper stride. He seems happy puttering about among his orchids and potted petunias until the government sends him off on a mission. His job: to ferret out the where and how of a counterfeit operation so gigantic that it threatens the national economy. Practically overnight, Raft latches on to the right blonde (Nina Foch), who leads him to the right tropical island, where he meets the Master Mind (George Macready), an underworld exquisite with a passion for fine music and archery. Macready, even with his handsome quiver of arrows, is no match for Raft.

Aside from the novelty of watching Macready drop a couple of men in their tracks like deer in Sherwood Forest, Allegro is notable for only one thing. It was directed by Ted Tetzlaff, whose sensitive work in a current minor thriller called The Window entitles him to something better than such conveyor-belt assignments.

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