LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies James S. Hamilton Love Letters—The letters involved were written for an inarticulate and rather indifferent lover by a fellow-officer with a gift for sweet-scented purplish...
...He met a girl— they fell in love...
...Jennifer Jones plays the amnesiac with a combination of the elfin and the pathetic that many people will find touching...
...It is an intensely personal story of a single individual, but it succeeds also in having a general significance that covers—and not superficially—the whole question of what the GI faces coming back to civilian life...
...Light on the movies James S. Hamilton Love Letters—The letters involved were written for an inarticulate and rather indifferent lover by a fellow-officer with a gift for sweet-scented purplish phrases—written from Italy to a waiting fiancee in England...
...Al Schmid was a young machinist, boarding in the house of a married fellow-worker...
...John Garfield (A1), Dane Clark as his Jewish fellow-hero, and Eleanor Parker as Al's sweetheart, keep the personal drama of love and friendship vivid and glowing—they with the others lift this personal drama into something that touches lives in countless American homes...
...They were a poor preparation for the intimacies of marriage when the lover returned and became the husband...
...Mature) * * * Pride of the Marines—The Warner Bros, have topped their war pictures with a film that arrived patly at almost the precise moment of post-war's beginning, when the problems it considers are actually with us instead of something to explore tentatively in anticipation of an uncertain future...
...They didn't get engaged till he joined the Marines, shortly after Pearl Harbor...
...It is a dramatization of the case of Al Schmid, the real-life Philadelphia Marine who—as in the film he bitterly puts it— swapped his eyes for a Navy Cross at Guadalcanal...
...The result, as a picture, is a slick presentation of a tale that seems to have psycho-neurotic depths, with a. strong appeal to susceptible emotions, so slick that tears will blind many an eye to the fundamental phoniness of it all...
...Joseph Cotten, the returned veteran who first caused and then cleared up the trouble, is straightforward and sensible enough to provide long stretches of credibility...
...Family...
...But an exploding grenade blinded him...
...Into this extraordinary set-up comes the letter-writer, the living embodiment of the fine and lovely sentiments that had led the girl astray...
...Life is finished for him, and he wants nobody's pity—but he has an enormous, infuriated pity for himself...
...At Guadalcanal he was one of three men who held off hundreds of Japs—an isolated bit of fighting which while we watch it seems merely a desperate struggle for survival...
...It takes a lot of love, understanding, and patience to bring him back to a fellowship with others again, and a realization that his sacrifice was important, and that he is only one of countless men with adjustments to make as fundamental and vital as his own...
...It turned out to be something crucial in the fight for Henderson Field, and Schmid and his surviving buddy were heroes...
...The girl served a prison-term as punishment...
...William Dieterle has directed the picture as if he believed every bit of it...
...Unfortunately the only other person present—the guilty one—was visited by a stroke of paralysis so that she too was unable to give evidence...
...In fact, the shock of discovering that the poetic epistolarian was on close acquaintance a drunk and a wife-beater, sent the poor girl into a long period of amnesia, unable to testify in her own behalf when she was tried for sticking a knife, fatally, into the brute...
...Love and marriage follow, and a gradual clearing up of the uncertainties surrounding the case...
...The cynical minority will wonder if Bernadette hasn't turned into the village idiot...
...The rest of the picture is Al's life in the hospital— his bitterness, rage, and morbid determination to keep himself shut off from others...
...He does come through, back among his friends with a hope for the future...
...A powerful film, expertly done...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 40
