On Screen
HERR, MIKE
ON SCREEN Three Kinds of Failure By Mike Herr The Nick Adams who turns up in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man has about as much to do with Hemingway as Andy Hardy did. The intensity...
...There is some feeling for the innocence of the time before the Great War, and some nice photography of the Michigan woods...
...a genuine sense of film-colony life in Rome...
...It is just enough at all times to keep the movie from engaging belief, no matter how powerfully it compells sympathy...
...Still, the movie does have its moments...
...If script writer A. E. Hotchner was determined to make a good movie from them, as he claimed, he should either have written a better screenplay or, seeing that things were out of his hands, withdrawn his name from the credits...
...There is not one character to believe in or care about, the story is clumsily told, and the whole operation has the look of a high-budget quickie...
...Like every other picture Vincent Minelli has ever made, Two Weeks in A nother Town has several things going for it—an astonishing sexual honesty...
...And the acting, bad as some of it gets, is at least interesting...
...Although they have failed to make a very good film, their courage and integrity make the fact of their failure almost unimportant...
...Eli Wallach, Ricardo Montalban, Arthur Kennedy, and Juano Hernandez, are good, and Paul Newman, as Ad Francis, the wrecked ex-champ, is much more than that...
...His great talent is no myth, but coated with the glucose and gloss of films like this one, it is getting harder and harder to take seriously...
...Hidden by a make-up job that would have constituted an adequate performance for most actors, he obliterates the too-familiar image and makes the old battler's mad agony at least as real and disturbing as Hemingway did...
...The stories from In Our Time were some of the very best work that he ever did...
...When Endore is shot by his own captain to keep him from endangering the ceasefire, the boy snatches up the knife and vanishes...
...It would be one more Minelli special, well-made trash, except that this time it is not even well made...
...One is left with great respect for the fine intentions of the Sanders Brothers, who made the film, and for John Saxon, who gave up the security of beach-boy roles for the tough, dangerous part of Endore...
...a terrifying climactic scene where the hero works off his suicidal urge by spinning wildly in a berserk Masaratti...
...There is in War Hunt an ineptness which dogs scene after scene, something weak in the direction and amateurish in the acting...
...Its story is complex, but is told simply, the implications of military morality and human perversion rising easily from the action...
...Every night Private Endore blacks up and sneaks behind enemy lines with his hunting knife...
...The intensity and honesty of the stories have been cashed in for a sound-stage conception of the initiation theme, their horrors calmed by Big Production, their attitudes romanticized in ways that Hemingway, even in his most adolescent moods, would have choked on...
...and some good performances, chiefly from Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor, bickering again as though they'd never stopped...
...War Hunt is about the value of the psychopathic killer as combat soldier...
...He is the perennial Most Promising Director, a designation that must be losing some of its luster now that he is middle aged...
...Minelli must know how good he is, though he doesn't seem to trust his own ability enough to break with mom and make the first-rate film that has been expected of him for the past 20 years...
...For this it is to be enormously admired, though I fear that, finally, it is hard to care for as a film...
...Endore teaches him to use the knife...
...As Nick, Richard Beymer, who is conspicuously light on talent, comes through all right in several scenes, while Susan Strasberg, who has talent, smothers it in the worst kind of New York-actressy performance— all enunciation, mouthing and studied breathing...
...It is a courageous and honest film, one of the rare American movies made without any compromise...
...During the day he guards the Korean orphan he has befriended against the influence of a decent new recruit: The recruit wants to teach the boy baseball...
Vol. 45 • September 1962 • No. 18
