Callaway Went Thataway (MGM] cheerfully spoofs a national institution—the oldtime movie cowboy, exhumed by TV, exalted on boxtops and enriched by millions of worshiping, gun-toting little fans. In fairness to Hopalong Cassidy, who dispatched deputies to a Hollywood screening to see if M-G-M had poisoned his waterhole, the studio adds a postscript to the film: "This picture was made in the spirit of fun and was meant in no way to detract from the wholesome influence, civic-mindedness and the many charitable contributions of Western idols of our American youth . . ."
Like Hoppy himself, Smoky Callaway becomes a TV craze on the strength of his ancient horse operas. Unlike Hoppy, Smoky in real life is an ornery cuss—a chippie-chasing roisterer on a steady diet of alcohol. What is worse, from the standpoint of Hucksters Fred MacMurray and Dorothy McGuire, Smoky has been missing for years. When their sponsor insists on meeting him, they hire a Hollywood agent (Jesse White) to follow Smoky's alcoholic spoor wherever it may lead, and bring him back alive.
Then they discover a dead ringer for Smoky in a simple, clean-living cowpoke named Stretch Barnes. The hucksters frantically try to train him how to behave before the camera and in Hollywood society. Despite his gift for social errors, e.g., hailing Clark Gable jovially as "Sam," Cowpoke Barnes successfully fools the sponsor and the kiddies. But just as the double seems thoroughly entrenched, Agent White dredges the real Smoky out of a Cuban ginmill and rushes him back to Hollywood for rehabilitation.
The plot leads inevitably to a snarl of identity between the two cowboys, both played by Howard Keel. But the picture picks up most of its fun en route, in the desperate connivance and tart wisecracks of MacMurray and McGuire, the elaborate innocence of Callaway's double, the real Smoky's talent for caching liquor so cleverly that he stays bewilderingly plastered throughout his alcoholic cure. Hopalong, however, need not call the sheriff. Callaway bares its teeth only to grin, not to bite; and it provides parents with welcome comic relief from the hoofbeats that have invaded the U.S. home.
The Light Touch (MGM) opens with a deft lesson in the art of stealing an old master's painting from a crowded Italian museum. A self-contained little thriller, from the planning to the getaway, this sequence is plotted and timed as neatly as the theft itself. It also pegs the film's picaresque hero without a wasted motion. Stewart Granger is the Raffles of art—clever, nonchalant, cynically aware that the painting is on loan from a church altar, so thoroughgoing a rascal that he not only carries on an affair with his henchman's wife but uses the husband's unwitting help to break it off when his interest flags.
But the tension of the opening sequence unwinds steadily in a dawdling intrigue of dishonor among thieves. Granger takes the painting to Tunis, where he meets silkenly villainous Art Dealer George Sanders ("You know I detest violence"), who has commissioned him to steal it. Granger tells Sanders that the painting was accidentally destroyed and proposes making forgeries instead for the wealthy collector's trade.