LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies A Medal for Benny. The name of Dorothy Lamour on the marquee is not much of a signal for admirers of John Steinbeck to rush in crowds to a movie house, but A Medal for Benny is...
...Tension and the obvious moral characterize it, with a grim performance by Lawrence Tieraey...
...Dtlliager—A fairly factual ease- history of the onee notorious Public Enemy...
...Family) * * * A Handy Guide To The Best Current Films A Royal Scandal—Handsome comedy of Catherine of Russia and one of her minor amours, spun out too long, with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Coburn in grand comic vein...
...A big production, top-notch cast, and several highly dramatic episodes...
...But, dead, he has put the town in the headlines, and there has to be a big demonstration, with a distinguished dispenser of medals on hand, and more headlines...
...Benny himself never appears...
...V-E Day has pretty well knocked the props from under pictures about the European war, but Counter Attack can stand confidently enough as an all-round good show...
...Full of humor, good nature, and contemporary color, but overlong...
...The theme is the exploitation of war-heroes...
...Family) The Clock—New York City plays genial host to a very nice romance between a soldier and a working girl...
...Joseph Gotten, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple lead an all-round good cast (Family) Meet Me in St...
...He lives in a -shack from which he is always on the point of being evicted because people borrow his rent money or he entertains- his neighbors too lavishly for this or that friendly reason—not a proper setting for medal-giving...
...The Steinbeck of Tortilla Flat, plus a sharp-pointed theme...
...Naish has been acting all sorts of parts in all grades of movies for years, always doing a good job but never having the luck to land .square on the beam to stardom, Like Barry Fitzgerald, he will be watched from now on, Dorothy Lamour—who has been symbolized by "sarong" just as other young actresses, maybe yearning for better things, get publicized for "oomph" etcetera, does as sincere and capable a performance as any girl you could think of...
...Some excellent acting, and fine Welsh singing...
...Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Anne Revere (a new and refreshing movie mother...
...Lows—Gay and hearty memories of not so long ago, excellent in songs and sentimeat and remarkable in little Margaret O'Brien...
...And who will get them out, friends or enemies...
...The civic problem is to make Benny's father, since he must be the recipient of the medal, respectable enough to be the center of all the hurrah...
...Good-for-nothing offspring of a simple, kindly paisano—the peasant-minded descendants of the racial mixture Spain left behind in southern California—he has been caught in the draft, gone to war, and died a heroic death before the story begins...
...Family) * * * Counter Attack...
...Family...
...Can he keep awake so they won't turn on him in the long, uncertain wait before they are dug out...
...A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—A fine and sensitive dramatization of a generous section of the popular novel, with outstanding acting all around and superb direction...
...Colonel Blimp—Handsome and entertaining coverage of the changes made by the years from the Boer War to the present in an English soldier-sportsman...
...Matttre) The Valley of Decision—Back in the bustle-wearing days of Pittsburgh's steel industry, Greer Garson as a servant in the' house of a rich family straightens out their affairs again and again...
...The Brighton Strangler—A murder story with an English actor set upon a killing career along a novel line...
...The Germans, for a change, are not the usual stereotyped Nazis of the movies, but a group of varied, care-' fully differentiated individuals...
...It is all pleasant, and some of it very funny...
...Paul Muni captured a group of Germans and gets caught with them in a cellar from which all escape is shut off by the falling of the rest of the building...
...John Lawson Howard's script and Zoltan Korda's direction make a continuously interesting drama of this episode...
...How the old man handled all this is something to see...
...Family...
...Mature) 111 Be Seeing Yo*—A war-shoek«*f soldier's readjustment to civilian life, warmly and sympathetically presented...
...Some Russian paratroopers are the vanguard of an attack on an eastern city held by the enemy...
...Family) The Corn Is Green—Bette Davis in a sympathetic character part for a change—a spmsteiish school-teaeher who devotes herself to starting a young Welsh miner on his way to greatness...
...The other "star"—Arturo de Cordova—seems a bit too handsome and da'shing and tooth-sparklin*for comfort...
...Family...
...But a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor makes him the town Hero...
...Taut and well done, with John Loder and June Dvrrprez...
...Mature...
...Family...
...And Marguerite Chapman, the only woman in the picture, manages to keep from seeming dragged in for romantic feminine appeal...
...He comes through it nobly, and movingly, and goes back contentedly to his old shack...
...But that can be fixed—there is a vacant house in a good neighborhood which public-spirited merchants can furnish temporarily, for the duration of the celebration, and he can live there in new clothes till the celebrities have completed their functions...
...It is simply an adventure tale...
...Why wasn't he off to the wars, getting medals with Benny...
...All the respectable, patriotic citizens awake to glory brought to the community by this local boy none of them knew—a boy, if they could remember him, they'd consider much better off in jail...
...A more inspired director— someone with a Preston Sturges genius for satire— could have put more sting into the contrast between honest simplicity and chamber-of-commerce publicity-seeking, but J. Carroll Naish makes Benny's father a figure that could carry an even heavier load...
...Family...
...The name of Dorothy Lamour on the marquee is not much of a signal for admirers of John Steinbeck to rush in crowds to a movie house, but A Medal for Benny is very much Steinbeck and only incidentally Lamour...
...Paul Muni, though he seems to think he has to act with every hair of his eyebrows, puts such a warmth of good nature into his Russian that his cheerful heroism and common sense keep a pleasant human feeling alive through all the mounting tension and excitement...
...National Velvet—A warm and enjoyable story of an English family and how an enchanting little girl's dream o£ winning the big steeplechase came true without hurting her common sense...
...He has only a wounded Partisan girl to help him guard his prisoners...
...Nobody but his father and his girl and a few of the local riff-raff cared much about him, or whether he ever came back...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 23
