The New Pictures

The Mob (Columbia) rates a B-plus for its efforts with a B-picture plot: the old one about the detective who bores from within a big-city racket to get the goods on the mystery man at the top. It is full of sluggings, shootings and characters with fake identities; the mastermind is the last anyone would suspect, and, at a venerably crucial moment in the final reel, the hero's girl falls into the villain's clutches.

Director Robert Parrish serves this rehash expertly, pointing up the tart flavor and inventive trimmings of William Bowers' script. In his detective's masquerade as an out-of-town hoodlum roughing his way into the favor of waterfront racketeers. Academy Award Winner Broderick (All the King's Men) Crawford plays a tough guy's tough guy with engagingly sardonic humor.

Come Fill the Cup (Warner) begins as the story of a crack newspaperman (James Cagney) who cracks up as an alcoholic. Out of a job, too wedded to the bottle to go on seeing the girl (Phyllis Thaxter) who wants to marry him,

Cagney becomes a ragged, drink-wheedling bum. Only his fright after a narrow brush with death under the wheels of a truck, and a night in the alcoholic ward, make him want to stop drinking. With the help of a reformed lush (James Gleason), he painfully succeeds, though he never loses the craving for the one drink that he knows will start him skidding downhill again.

For the first third of the film, sharp dialogue, a good Cagney performance and the dramatized lore of alcoholism give Come Fill the Cup some of the kick of The Lost Weekend. But the rest is watered down with flat melodramatics.

The sober Cagney, having risen to city editor, is drafted by Publishing Tycoon Raymond Massey to reform his drunken nephew (Gig Young), now the husband of Cagney's old girl friend. The job proves mostly a matter of getting the nephew out of gangsters' clutches. The film's crude mixture of social problem and underworld formula is epitomized in the climax: a plug-ugly points a gun at Cagney and orders him to take a slug of bourbon.

Texas Carnival (MGM) turns Red Skelton and Esther Williams loose in a familiar but cheerful Technicolored antic. They play a carnival sideshow team mistaken for a pair of multimillionaires at a grandiose Texas resort hotel.

The picture balances one straight romance (Actress Williams and Singer Howard Keel) against one comic romance (Comedian Skelton and Dancer Ann Miller), but it is dominated by Skelton's buffoonery, which looks like a one-man history of low comedy -good, bad and indifferent. When he is good (e.g., gulping jelly beans at a poker game, only to learn he has devoured $5,000 worth of substitute chips), he is as funny as anyone on the screen. When he is bad (e.g., making cross-eyes), he is as tiresome as a small boy imitating Ben Turpin.

More consistent, and the freshest thing in the film, is Keenan Wynn's performance as a cantankerous oil and cattle baron with an amazing capacity for hard liquor, who puts his fist reverently to his heart when .anyone utters the sacred name of Texas.

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