The State of the Cinema World War II Revisited
Dworkin, Martin S.
The State of the Cinema World War II Revisited by MARTIN S. DWORKIN The vaunted "anti-war" or "pacifist" temper of our contemporary films about World War II appears to be as ambiguous; and...
...The most famous instance is Laurence Stallings' anti-war play, What Price Glory?—the 1926 movie version of which chose to stress the internecine battling of Sergeant Quirt and Captain Flagg...
...The contest is the more unequal because the officers, led by Arthur O'Connell, Kath-ryn Grant, and Ernie Kovacs, are really doctors, nurses, and administrators who happen to be wearing uniforms—the amateur soldiers traditionally believed to be the worst in positions of command, while being the most easily outwitted by their fellow, but accidentally subordinate, civilians...
...In the inevitable, nostalgic comparisons of the film and the play, it is the enlargement and technical elaboration of details that obtrude...
...The story of the Army's special Ranger troops spends much of its time rehearsing oratory about the need for an elite attack unit and reminiscing about being billeted in Dundee during training under British commandos, and about passes and related romancing in London, Naples, and environs...
...This is a favorite way of remembering the war, of course, wherein battles with the enemy are clearly interruptions in the larger warfare of soldiers against the brass and regulations...
...This way of redefining the real war, found as a common element in war films, follows from the frequent sense of ordinary soldiers everywhere that the nearest and ultimate enemy isn't wearing the uniform they have been trained to hate...
...Miss Nuyen is exquisitely pretty, as she ought to be...
...The differences in casting, and even the persistence of the familiar music, are swallowed in the bombast of effects...
...some fastidious nostalgia for wartime cameraderie, tumbleweed romance, and glittering, ebullient youth-fulness...
...His participation in the singing of There Is Nothin' Like a Dame, soon after the opening of the film, is preparation, surely, for the sophistication in race attitudes to follow...
...South Pacific even adds enlightened race relations to the ways of remembering World War II, reflecting the changing ideologies and patterns of behavior the war accelerated and enforced...
...Richard Quine's direction occasionally comes down with a heavy hand, and the farce is sometimes too studied...
...But the film does make much of the nurse's enlightenment in accepting the planter's half-breed children...
...There are the native women, who must be remembered as exotic and beautiful, of course—necessary for the savoring of passing idyls, without penalities...
...The year it opened on Broadway, 1949, significantly saw a climax of a period of film productions dealing with the Negro problems in the United States, with Pinky, Home of the Brave, Intruder in the Dust, and Lost Boundaries...
...In The Deep Six, the usual melodramatic pressures sorely try the conscience of a Quaker, played by Alan Ladd, who, logically enough, happens to be an officer aboard a destroyer fighting the Japanese in the Aleutians...
...There is even the musical show for morale, including the muscular impersonations of females—here obviously unnecessary, compared to the womanless situation of the men in the analogous show scenes of, say, The Bridge on the River Kwai...
...Cinematographer Leon Shamroy's device of vignetting the singers, shading off part of the huge screen while they are in close-up, is soon annoying...
...The propaganda features of the war years now running on television, and even the post-war documentaries such as Henry Salomon's Victory at Sea over NBC, are much more outspoken for peace—perhaps because, among other things, they are so much clearer about who the enemy is, why he is evil, what must be done to defeat him, and what is waiting at home for the conquerors...
...In this case, the war is over—at least in the European theater, and the purpose presumably is not to elevate morale, but to promote non-regulation romance among women who happen to be officers and men who happen not to be...
...It is an old story, about what is becoming an old war...
...Quaker qualms, symbolizing democratic, civilized humanitarian-ism, eventually prove to be only personal doubts to be overcome, as a man's comrades are struck down around him, and battle convinces him to put his brave ideals to accepted, manly use...
...There is actually inconsistency and conflict between the representational and evocative moods of the photography—so that neither is believable or moving...
...It is profoundly illuminated in Paths of Glory, in which the German antagonists are never visible to the French soldiers...
...The very size of the Todd-AO screen emphasizes the perennial movie problem of dealing with musical numbers in which people have to stand still and sing to one another...
...Now that that war is over, there seems to be little need or relevance for the usual, unashamed war-movie pacifism, so easily accepted because so patriotically transcended...
...The "mad ball" of the title is really a variation of that hoary gimmick for injecting vaudeville entertainment into war movies: the musical show, complete with band and singers, that has to be put on despite the opposition of the brass or other problems...
...But its caustically ironic view of the absurdities and futilities of military devotion to duty is unique —comparable, in fact, only to the bitter anti-militarism of Paths of Glory, itself alone among films of World War I (see "World War I Revisited," in the May issue...
...It is still not possible to have Che two latter lovers marry...
...An example of war-film pacifism recalling the wartime exhortations to combativeness is The Deep Six (Warner Brothers...
...crime thrillers, notably the recent Violent Saturday...
...and isolated as that of the films about World War I. The Bridge on the River Kwai unquestionably represents a climactic moment in our thinking about warfare and the nature o? military enterprise (see "A Film Masterpiece," The Progressive, April...
...In the vast format, the characters are prevented from projecting to the audience—except in some of Ray Walston's comic scenes, and some of Juanita Hall's as "Bloody Mary," the part she created in the original production...
...Most often, it is played for comedy —making for that particularly palatable form of nostalgia in which war and military life are remembered for the victories that really meant something...
...For the rest, the approach to World War II of the new films may be said to reveal some deep disillusionment over the fruits of victory...
...Much of Darby's Rangers (Warner Brothers), for example, looks the way so many company or division histories read...
...The film production by Buddy Adler at Twentieth Century-Fox, directed by Joshua Logan, is determinedly huge and spectacular, intended to follow the growing industry commitment of its "big" films to long-run, "roadshow" exhibition, in the selected theaters having the enlarged-screen Todd-AO installations...
...The idea of a man having to overcome religious scruples against killing in order to fight for a just and worthy cause is one of the basic themes of democratic melodrama—familiar in Westerns, such as the current From Hell to Texas...
...The versions of the war appearing on theatrical and television screens are so various, in fact, that we are given a choice of ways to remember —some of which may prove confusing to veterans troubled by memories of the war that do not fit into movie forms...
...And, there is the presence of a Negro, almost obligatory in service films since the war, in the chorus of Seabees...
...In the end, Josh Logan, who directed both the stage and film versions, deserves the credit—as we compare our memories of having been charmed and stimulated—and the blame—as we judge this experience of being bludgeoned by techniques and overweening opulence...
...The parallel romance of the two young people, played by John Kerr and Frances Nuyen, is even less moving...
...In Operation Mad Ball (Columbia Pictures), the issue is further clarified by placing the action just after VE, Day, when the Germans are no longer enemies, but only POWs happy to cooperate in the machinations of GIs against officers—and Americans against Americans...
...Based upon a play by Arthur Carter, who also wrote the screenplay with Blake Edwards and producer Jed Harris, the film is an unabashed farce...
...His attempts to evoke moods by coloring scenes with filters, following the expressive techniques of the Japanese, become heavy and literal, interfering with both vision and imagination...
...But many old rituals of GI triumph over officers are rehearsed with new comic variations —particularly those which devastate Ernie Kovacs, capering broadly in his first movie role., The traditional figure of the big-time-operator enlisted man appears conspicuously in what is by now the classic of nostalgic reminiscence about World War II, South Pacific, based upon the musical play by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Joshua Logan...
...and The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which the builders and destroyers of the strategic bridge belong to the same British Army...
...There seem to have been several different World War lis, while it was going on, and especially when it is being remembered...
...Despite the producers' boasts that the film permits us to see all that could only be talked about or suggested on the stage, what is shown adds only spectacular quantity...
...The romance of the callow Navy nurse, played only competently by Mitzi Gaynor, and the worldly French planter, acted with a mature dignity by Rossano Brazzi (and sung by Giorgio Tozzi), is never as electric as that remembered quality achieved by Mary Martin and the late, magnificent Ezio Pinza...
...and, especially, war films, perhaps best exemplified by Sergeant York, significantly made in 1941...
...South Pacific was itself an historic occasion in the theater, as well as a symbolization of ways by which people wanted to remember the war...
...The action of the film, however, fits neatly into one of the most familiar formulas of the genre: the education, largely at the hands of veteran doughfaces, of an arrogant, green shavetail officer...
...There are, again, the nurses present—one of the easiest and commonest ways of providing heroines close to where the heroes are fighting...
...After the lovely score and the qualities of the story, this nostalgic reminiscence may be the leading reason why it has had so deep and wide an appeal...
...Subtlety or delicacy of action, music, or meaning are overwhelmed...
...some reassessments of the villainies of the vanquished—now that they are our friends...
...It even sounds like them, as heavy use is made, by old war-film campaigner William A. Well-man (who directed the classic Wings in 1927), of the much-abused documentary device of an off-screen narrator—here a worldly-wise top sergeant, to impart a tone of newsreel realism to obviously reenacted happenings...
...and some of the staple thrills of combat melodrama...
...But Kerr seems strangely bloodless and unmoved, as he ought not to be...
...But the absence of perorations about Nazi and Japanese villainy distinguishes it from the bloodcurdlers of the wartime era still unreeling over television...
...Operation Mad Ball focuses upon the playing of the military game in a hospital unit, recreating as central figures two of the classic folk heroes of democratic armies: the plain private, here Jack Lemmon, and the strategically-placed sergeant, here Mickey Rooney, who really run everything, exacting devoted obedience from all ranks by sheer generalship in outmaneuvering officers and regulations...
...By now, in fact, the race-mixture issue in the love affairs of the nurse and the French planter —who has two children from a former marriage to a native woman— and, more directly, in that of the young Marine lieutenant and the lovely Tonkinese girl, "Liat," has a kind of historical quality...
Vol. 22 • June 1958 • No. 6
