In a football game a certain pleasure may be derived from calling the plays beforehand, but in "The Homestretch," which happens to be about horse-racing, the average spectator will soon tire of matching wits with a plodding script-writer. Maureen O'Hara and Cornel Wilde join and separate as mechanically as two participants in a Virginia reel, with the much-abused backdrop of horse races and a stately Marlyland homestead. But there is nothing positively unpleasant about the picture: blushing technicolor is made the most of, especially in the newsreel shots of the English coronation, and the photography of the races is really very good.

Wilde takes the girl away from her dull, suave fiance, and marries her on a boat going to the Argentine. But only half an hour of the show has passed, and it is obvious that something is going to break up the happy marriage. What, if not the hero's bad ways and the "gay set"-he hangs around with? There are the usual ominous portents from the beginning, the usual "old friend" with fine, curving lips, named Kitty, and the usual unsociological statement, which goes something like, "I'm bad. You can't change me." She leaves him, while he turns himself good, and then... The climax is a horse race, in which his horse is running against hers. Now, if you want to find out the result, you might as well go.

There is no really had acting in the movie: it's all standard, mass-produced, with always the right gesture or tone of voice for the right emotion, all as dull as the day-before-yesterday's newspaper. Maureen O'Hara is as bosomy an example of pretty American girlhood as one could wish; Cornel Wilde is a fine young man, ambitious, though a little wild; while the minor characters could be transferred to another such movie as easily as a Ford part can be replaced. At best, they bustle through the plot using the lowest common denominator of human action, and at worst they are a bunch of Martians imitating home sapiens, having seen them once, from a lunar distance. So when the technicolor and Maureen O'Hara have cased to dazzle his eyes, the movie-geer will start to fidget in his upholstered chair, and hope that this one will turn out a little different. But it won't, it won't.