A Litter of Young Liberals
MARKFIELD, WALLACE
On SCREEN By Wallace Mark field A Litter of Young Liberals Once upon the screen, there was GI Joe the beachcharger, who looked like Everyman and declaimed, from the side of his mouth, the blank...
...Man oh man, when ah' get outta' here—if ah ever get outta' here—ah'm gonna' build me the biggest bar in the world and ah'm gonna' draw me the tallest beer and ah'm gonna' get me a gal with the biggest...
...As sensitive and thin-skinned as Stephen Daedalus, he spends most of his time stubbornly bucking the System, fighting a futile, forlorn fight to preserve his integrity in a world populated by sadistic, fascist-type officers, goonish bunk-mates, demanding fathers and a host of other hoked-up authority symbols...
...If you belong to the massive majority of those who see in Marlon Brando an artist of the highest order, The Young Lions is more than worth the trek to the local second-run house...
...The Greens are going to be running things when this over...
...It's wonderful...
...Even his underplaying—and at times here, he almost fades off the screen—has an overweening arrogance when you set him alongside such unpretentious, low-keyed Hollywood buffs as Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford...
...Most of the footage is given over to him, and he gets the chance to prove, if proof is needed by now, that he's just about the most aggressive actor in the business...
...Only here and there bits and snips that hint he hasn't had it too good (he's clerked at Macy's, he's shy around girls) ; that he's far from being a real intellectual (never mind the Modern Library Ulysses in his foot locker...
...By and large, in shot after shot, the film gives evidence that director Edward Dmytryk and everyone else who worked on it have used all their resources...
...I think, particularly, of the wild and wonderful motorcycle ride, which offers a nightmarish suspension of the laws of space and time and motion...
...It doesn't matter...
...And what will he say at a time when all the good protests have long since been made...
...Ultimately, though, we respond not so much to Noah Ackerman as we do to Montgomery Clift's belief in his role, in the almost tragic spectacle of an actor attempting to express, with every line of a face that has aged badly, the importance of his undertaking...
...He gets into trouble, however, with a five-minute desert-war sequence, where the temptation to poetry goes against the best interests of his theme...
...more important is the fact that he is a Victim, and, for the vast liberal audience which has had to make do lately with exploited Apaches and misguided adolescents, he comes as a Godsend...
...then the fire of mortars and machine-guns and small arms is orchestrated in with such delicacy, such meticulous attention to technical detail, that you half forget this is all meant to show that war is systematized inhumanity...
...Yet there is something in him that is a part of us all: the unspoken assumption that he will come through, that things will remain under control, that if he will not inherit the earth other good men will...
...On SCREEN By Wallace Mark field A Litter of Young Liberals Once upon the screen, there was GI Joe the beachcharger, who looked like Everyman and declaimed, from the side of his mouth, the blank verse of the Harry Browns and Norman Corwins...
...Something is eating at him, something has worn him down prematurely and soured his days...
...But in recent years, GI Joe has turned into a more subtle, complex animal, with all manner of moods and motivations...
...Of such stuff is Noah Ackerman, puniest of The Young Lions, a New York Jew who is spared no indignity at the hands of his brutish buddies and who must try to lick the whole damned company before emerging, finally, as a serviceable vessel of democracy...
...Little of his past is made known...
...Sometimes Dmytryk, without overstating, gets his effects just right...
...The smallest gesture —whether it's the wriggling of a shoulder or the tilt of a chin—seems to be a confident announcement that he has gotten to the heart of the matter, said all that can be said not only about the character but about the human situation...
...And Maximilian Schell, the neurasthenic heavy, is just about perfect...
...Thus, despite its fundamental dishonesty, there is something pathetic and touching in his final joyous declaration of faith in his captain, in all that is wise, kind and liberal: "You know what...
...Any minute, it seems, he will make significant comment, mouth a fiery protest...
...he still can't spell "extenuating...
...The screen is darkened and silenced for the rising of the sun...
...It dawns on me that I have unintentionally slighted Dean Martin, who gives a soft-shoe, sloe-eyed and generally pleasing imitation of Robert Mitchum...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
