The New Pictures

Bright Leaf (Warner) tells the story of the rise of the cigarette, but it is a movie that is neither firm nor fully packed. Laid in North Carolina in the 18905, and based on Foster Fitz-Simons' historical novel, it leans heavily on such standbys as the rakehell hero (Gary Cooper), the bosomy belle of the Old South (Patricia Neal) and the brazen hussy (Lauren Bacall), who is presented as the madam of what is delicately described as a "boardinghouse for ladies."

Cooper, in a string tie and Stetson, rides into town to resume his family's feud with Donald Crisp, the local tobacco tycoon and father of Patricia Neal. Teaming up with Jeff Corey, a Connecticut Yankee inventor of a newfangled cigarette-making machine, Cooper ruins Tycoon Crisp, marries his spirited daughter and displays his growing ruthlessness by flexing his jaw muscles and compressing his lip. Along the way are all the standard climaxes--street fights, a shooting, a suicide, fires, foreclosures and pointless lovers' quarrels. At the end, discovering that power corrupts and that none of his old friends, not even Madame Bacall, finds him lovable any more, Cooper morosely mounts his horse and rides away into the sunset.

Love That Brute (20th Century-Fox) tries to duplicate the success of 1941's gangster comedy, Tall, Dark and Handsome. In fact, it gives screen credit to the scripters who wrote the original. The carbon copy seems too flimsy for 1950s moviegoing tastes.

What apparently prompted the remake was a close resemblance between the leading character--a bigshot gangster trying to behave like a gentleman--and the proven specialty of new Star Paul Douglas, who has clicked with audiences as a gruff, goldhearted mug. But this time Actor Douglas is forced to push his appeal close to the point of diminishing returns.

As an underworld boss who values his reputation for homicide in the Chicago of 1928, Douglas is a softie who puts his victims out of circulation by imprisoning them comfortably in his cellar. He falls for genteel Governess Jean Peters ("a dame with class"), persuades her to take charge of a pint-sized guttersnipe whom he forces to pose as his son. Jean turns out to be an aspiring singer who can wiggle her assets on a nightclub floor--and switch right back to being as prim as Little Red Riding Hood. Douglas' problem: to go straight for her sake without inviting trouble from his arch rival, Pretty Willie (Cesar Romero*).

Douglas, Keenan Wynn, Joan Davis and Arthur Treacher work to make the film's burlesque of gangster customs fitfully amusing, though it is never good enough to offset a phony love story that insists on taking itself seriously. As the truculent brat who poses as the bigshot's son (and who is intended to be lovable), Peter Price is the last, unspeakable word in precocious delinquency. Students of U.S. movie morality, noting that the t gangster's innocence of any actual killing qualifies him for a hero's fadeout, may be forced to conclude that racketeering short of murder is not punishable by Hollywood's Production Code.

The Rocking Horse Winner (Rank; Universal-International) is a gallant attempt to make a movie of a wispy little D. H. Lawrence short story that is just sturdy enough to hold together on the printed page. Written with the matter-of-fact simplicity of a fairy tale. Lawrence's original tells of a sensitive, unloved boy who has the strange gift of divining horse-racing winners while rocking on his nursery charger. He uses the gift to keep his extravagant mother supplied with money. But it imposes a strain that finally kills him after he picks the Derby winner.

Despite the taste and good intentions of Britain's Actor-Producer John Mills and Scripter-Director Anthony Pelissier. the fantasy proves unequal to the strain of expansion into a feature film. Individual sequences are effective, the camera work is good, and there are some able performances, notably by John Howard (Oliver Twist) Davies as the boy and Valerie Hobson as his mother. But the film gets its moods mi-ed up, plumbs none of them decisively. For much of its length, it flits between the comic and the spooky, as if it did not mean to be taken seriously. With the weight of tragedy laid on it, the frail story crumbles altogether.

* Who played the Douglas role in Tall, Dark end Handsome.

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