Cinema: The New Pictures, Mar. 9, 1959

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Never Steal Anything Small (Universal-International) was first conceived by Playwright Maxwell Anderson and Director Rouben Mamoulian, back in 1953, as a Broadway musical drama—a sort of Guys and Dolls with a social message. The message: If Robin were alive today, he would be a labor leader, and even if he gave to the poor what he stole from the rich, he would still be damned for a Hood. What with the conservative temper of the times, and a series of union scandals, the authors could never quite raise the money fof a Broadway production—a difficulty that is not hard to understand. Even in this cautious rewrite, the story often sounds like a blatant apology for crooked labor leaders.

"Crooks have their place,'' the hero (James Cagney) remarks, and that place, he seems to think, is in the president's office of every union. At any rate, by the timely employment of criminal methods, ranging from the well-known bite to a mass snatch of the voting opposition, the hero wins the presidency of the local. Whereupon, in order to make good on his blithe campaign promise of a new union hall, complete with a bar and a bowling alley, he hijacks a crate of watches worth $750,000 and fences them out to big jewelry firms.

Impressed by his flair for the grand, vote-getting gesture, a dissident minority persuades the hero to give the big punk (Nehemiah Persoff) in the parent union a run for his expense money. But just before election time, the cops find out about those watches. So the jig's up? Nonsense. The election is won. What decent, self-respecting union man. the hero blandly wants to know, could deny his vote to a fellow who had stolen $750,000 from some great big impersonal insurance company, and then turned every last penny of it over to the working men?

Cagney is in fighting trim for his part, and the script by Charles Lederer, who also directed, gives him some fairly lively canvas to bounce around on. The songs are not much, but Cagney carries them off nicely in a hollered-out, newsboy alto that makes Shirley (Oklahoma!) Jones, the girl he doesn't get, sound like Renata Tebaldi. But not even the pleasure of catching Cagney at close to his best can entirely appease the sense that this is really an amoral little movie. Not even the greediest hands in labor's till have ever publicly demanded what this picture demands: the right to steal.

The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (20th Century-Fox). "I," sighs Horace Pennypacker Jr. (Clifton Webb), "will go down in history as the most misunderstood man of my century.'' The century is the 19th, and the remarkable Mr. P., a prominent Pennsylvania manufacturer (Pennypacker's Prime Products), is what was known at the time as a freethinker. He is president of the Darwin League. He makes fiery speeches in favor of woman suffrage ("Women seem to be people—let them vote"). He goes lolly-gagging about the landscape in an avant-garde motorcar known as a Firestone Columbus. And at every opportunity he comes crashing down, and damn the Spode, on the side of lip rouge and attached collars.