THE' CINEMA
" The Story of G.I. Joe:" At the London Pavilion. " Conflict." At Warners.—" Painted Boats." At the Tivoli.
IT is a pleasure to see an American war film which conscientiously pursues military fact rather than military fancy. The Story of G.I. Toe is based on the writings of Ernie Pyle, who became America's most popular war correspondent and lost his life on Iwojima stand- ing with the infantrymen whose chronicler he had become. The power of Ernie Pyle's writing lay not in the interpretation of strategy or the factual reporting of the tactics of battle. His work was in the more homely tradition of American journalism ; he was concerned with the men rather than with the battle which surged bewilderingly around their lonely fox-holes. This quality the filth has well pre- served. Indeed it is sometimes anecdotal and disjointed to the point of shapelessness. The journalist himself appears and is adequately impersonated by Mr. Burgess Meredith, but he takes little part in the events depicted and is there rather to remind us that we are seeing the war through the eyes of this single, sensitive observer. This quality of reticence and modesty about the film is one which Mr. Pyle himself would no doubt have demanded. We see him accompany a small and diminishing company of American infantry- men from their baptism of fire in Tunisia to the final triumph of the survivors on the road to Rome. The film seeks to show us a group of raw infantrymen turned by death, discomfort and comradeship into a body of hardened battle veterans. In this and in its portrait of a war-wise sergeant (beautifully played by Robert Mitchum) the film has points of similarity with the British film The Way Ahead. In the sequence in which we see Nazi snipers ferretted out of a ruined Italian church, the film also suggests the influence of Len Lye's Kill or be Killed—that extraordinary M.o.I. analysis of the sniper's art. It is in this sequence that the director, William Wellman, gives full play to his obvious preoccupation with the incongruity of modern warfare amidst the ancient religious associations of the Italian landscape. Later we see the infantrymen held up on the slopes below Monte Cassino, and as the cold, wet, shell-stunned men turn in more and more upon their own brooding thoughts, their mood is set against the tolling of monastery bells, and their dimly illuminated dug-outs take on a bare, monastic. simplicity. But the film's principal achieve- ment is a group of portraits of men at war.
In Conflict, Humphrey Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet and Alexis Smith waste some good acting on a melodramatic plot which is un-
forgivable in lacking both conviction and excitement. A psychologist pursues a wife-murderer and finally entraps him by the subtle under- mining of his sanity. But since the activities of Mr. Greenstreet's
Psychologist are both obvious and improbable, impatience can scarcely be offset by the polish of Mr. Brgart's performance as a man who
tires of his wife and turns his attention to her sister. Neither Mr. Bogart nor his wife are unsympathetic figures, and the psychological profundities of the plot are unequal to the task of explaining why such nice people should find it necessary to become involved in an ex- tremely unsavoury crime.
Painted Boats sets out to tell the story of our canals and their im- portance to national life. Unfortunately it seeks also to interest us in a personal romance of a highly conventional order, and fact becomes irritatingly tangled with fiction. The commentary is as likely to leap into a pompous and statistical description of the impor- tance of canals to the war effort as it is to break into bad verse in interpretation of the propelling of a barge through a tunnel. What a pity that such good material has been twisted at one and the same time to so many over-ambitious and incompatible purposes.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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