New Picture

This Is the Army (Warner) on Techni-colored celluloid should make the flesh version's $1,951,045.11 (earned for Army Emergency Relief) look like eleven cents in a deserving bucket. For it offers U.S. cinemaudiences the rare pleasure of feeling generous toward a generous job.*

The screen story, to be sure, is middling silly, with George Murphy stumping around with white-of-egg on his temples, looking about as middle-aged as a popular halfback in the high-school drama, and Joan Leslie rather brutally strong-arming his "son," Lieut. Ronald Reagan, into a war wedding. But even such stuff has its curious, warm appropriateness, and once the show proper gets marching to the ir resistible extroversions of military brass, you can hear nothing else, least of all your own second thoughts. Some high points:

> Michael Curtiz' broad-brushed management of a scene in which the entire cast of 1918--5 Yip Yip Yap hank, on the closing night, marches from the stage through the audience to their France-bound transport. This scene, almost as good as similar tearjerkers in Cavalcade, is new with the film version.

> An "old-timers" number, featuring some grizzled, winning atavists from World War I's Yip Yip and climaxing in sad-face Patriot Irving Berlin's almost voiceless, endearing rendition of O How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.

> The horsing and singing of the wool-bearing Ladies of the Chorus, who have taken almost excruciating care to be mistaken neither for transvestite chorusmen nor for the quite convincing young ladies they dared to be on Broadway.

> The all-Negro What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear, vividly sung, skatted and danced, and abetted by some punching-bag polyrhythms from Sergeant Joe Louis and by his startling stage presence (see cut).

If there is an exception worth taking, it is to Warner Bros.' continued public rum-bleseating with the President of the United States. It is still any gossip's guess whether the engagement is official or whether they just like each other very, very much. But when, in two pictures so close together as Mission to Moscow (TIME, May 10) and This Is the Army, the President is referred to with such breath-catching reverence, it seems only decent that the audience should dim the lights, steal out softly, and leave them alone together.

* Warner Bros, will take costs only. Director Michael Curtiz, Kate Smith and many another principal, following the lead of Author-Composer Irving Berlin, have donated their services. The men who do the brunt of the work do it at soldiers' pay.

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