The New Pictures

The Charge of the Light Brigade

(Warner). On Oct. 25, 1854, the suicidal advance of 673 British cavalrymen into the teeth of Russian cannon fire through a valley at Balaklava, in the Crimean war, proved to be a maneuver less beneficial to England's military than to its literary history. Caused by a mistake in orders, the sole practical significance of the charge was to give the glamour of a spectacular British victory to what was really a minor British defeat. Its significance in literature, as the inspiration of Tennyson's famed ballad, will be considerably enhanced by this picture. The Charge of the Light Brigade explains the confusion in the Crimea as romantically as possible. If the result is untrustworthy as research, it is superlatively valid as entertainment, with an honest emotional ring that makes it one of the outstanding cinemas of the season.

To get at the cause behind the mysterious blunder at Balaklava, Screenwriters Michael Jacoby and Rowland Leigh have arbitrarily chosen for their stage the tried & true terrain of Northern India. Here, in 1850, Captain Geoffrey Vickers saves the life of Surat Khan in a leopard hunt the day before the Khan learns that the British Government has discontinued his fat subsidy. Months later, Geoffrey reaps the reward of his good turn. When the Khan's tribesmen have surrounded the military outpost at Chukoti, Geoffrey and the girl (Olivia de Havilland) who loves his brother are the only members of the garrison who survive cold-blooded massacre. To avenge the slaughter at Chukoti becomes the sole purpose of Vickers' 27th Lancers. Its chance comes at the siege of Sebastopol where Surat Khan, now allied with Russia, is holding the heights of Balaklava opposite the Lancers, stationed in the valley. When Headquarters gives him the orders for his regiment to retreat, Geoffrey rewrites them as a command to attack. The brigade moves forward, under withering fire, to simultaneous vindication and destruction.

Combining in fresh and spontaneous form the kinetic appeal of Lives of a Bengal Lancer with the patriotic fervor of Cavalcade, The Charge of the Light Brigade will be important to cinema students less for the solution it offers as to the riddles of the Light Brigade than for the mystery it deepens as to why the U. S. cinema industry can wave the British flag so much more effectively than its own. In this case, the specific credit for so doing goes, in addition to its authors, to Irish Actor Errol Flynn, Hungarian Director Michael Curtiz and U. S. Producer Hal Wallis, for whom The Charge of the Light Brigade represents the $1,000,000 climax of the busiest executive year in Hollywood.

Harold Brett Wallis, 39, went to Chicago's McKinley High School, got his first job sweeping out the office of an electric company, soon became sales manager for Hughes Electric Heating Co. From sales, he branched into advertising, later into show business. In Los Angeles he was managing the old Garrick Theatre when he met the late Sam Warner, went to work in the latter's publicity department. Increasingly, the Warner Brothers came to rely on Hal Wallis for production as well as exploitation decisions, put him in charge of First National when they bought that studio in 1928. Wallis made Dawn Patrol, Five Star Final, Little Caesar. In 1931 Warners brought their two plants together. Centre of production was the Burbank lot. Darryl Zanuck was put in charge. Wallis arrived one morning to find a workman taking his name off the door to replace it with that of Zanuck. Wallis sat on the stairs and laughed. What made it funny was that he had just finished a picture where a man came to his office to find his name being taken off the door. As an Associate Producer under Zanuck, Wallis supervised One-Way Passage, Gold Diggers of 1933, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Two and one-half years later Zanuck left to form Twentieth Century Productions. Wallis' name went back on the most important Warner Bros, door, has remained there ever since.

The office behind the door is modest, unostentatious, paneled in dark oak. Wallis spends 12 to 14 hours a day in it. Outside is a lounge resembling a small cocktail bar where daily waits a long succession of writers, supervisors, agents and technicians for decisive two-or three-minute interviews. Wallis checks every budget, red-penciling items he thinks too high. Models of every important set are carried in to be demonstrated to him. The mild, incessant hum of well-routined activity is occasionally broken by stormy story conferences. Producer Wallis may reject other men's ideas but he rarely enforces his own. His success as an executive rests on a shrewd instinct in selecting men. Under him, Warner Bros, have acquired a reputation for daring experiments, a reputation largely due to Wallis' eclectic tastes. In recent months, he has pioneered with fantasy (Green Pastures), costume romance (Anthony Adverse), poetic drama (A Midsummer Night's Dream). Less publicized than any other Hollywood executive. Producer Wallis lives on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley, drives a Cadillac to work, plays a little golf on Sunday. He has been known to turn down his wife, Comedian Louise Fazenda. for pictures he did not think she suited. Spasmodic outbreaks of puckish humor shatter his calm executive mask. He has disrupted story conferences with imitations of Rudy Vallee and Joe E. Brown, can hold his own at banquets with professional gagsters. Tall, affable, dimpled, his personal charm is notable in a business whose executives are conspicuously lacking in that quality.

Without Orders (RKO) contains one exciting sequence in which an airline stewardess (Sally Eilers) takes over the controls of a transport plane in a storm, lands it safely on radio instructions from her pilot boy friend (Robert Armstrong), who is on the ground. For the rest, one more minor-league investigation of air travel implying that this is an adventure rather than a convenience, Without Orders is likely to arouse more indignation from airline executives than enthusiasm from lay audiences. Best and most inevitable shot: the wrecked plane of a stunt flyer (Vinton Haworth) bursting into flames after its crash.

Pigskin Parade (Twentieth Century-Fox). Whether this was intended as a musical picture with a collegiate background or a football picture to end all football pictures remains uncertain and unimportant. What comes out is an all-time high in gridiron mirth and a musical that ranks with the season's best. For the radio celebrities, revolving stages and philharmonic orchestras that are current cinemusical trappings, Producer Darryl F. Zanuck has substituted a story that prances like a mustang, half-a-dozen songs with hit possibilities, a cast of capable young troupers who perform their functions with a contagious enjoyment.

Yale would never have played coeducational and nonexistent Texas State University if a New Haven office boy had not made a mistake. Since the invitation cannot be rescinded, Yale's press agent (Eddie Nugent) pounds out enthusiastic copy. Texas Coach Slug Winters (Jack Haley) is enthusiastic, too, until his tough wife Bessie (Patsy Kelly) fractures his star passer's leg. In time's nick Slug fills the gap with a barefoot Texas melon-grower named Amos (Stuart Erwin) who can toss a cantaloupe incredible distances, learns to do even better with a football. Despite the intervention of a blizzard, the charms of Arline Judge and a good deal of assorted harmonizing, Amos wins the Yale game by taking off his shoes and stockings in the Yale Bowl and racing through the snow to a touchdown.

Catchiest of the good tunes by Lew Pollack & Sidney D. Mitchell seems to be It's Love I'm After, sung by Judy Garland, a 14-year-old Murfreesboro, Tenn. girl.

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