New Picture

The Purple Heart (20th Century-Fox) was made behind locked doors, and in defiance of Washington officials who were soft-pedaling Jap atrocities. A few weeks ago, Washington changed its tune. Producer Darryl Zanuck* was urged to finish the film as soon as possible. Reason: it is a picture about Japanese atrocities, and Washington had decided to talk about the atrocities.

The picture shows the effects rather than the processes of torture. Its largely fictional subject: what happened to eight U.S. flyers who raided Tokyo, crashed in China, and were handed over to the

Japanese by Chinese collaborators. Its treatment: cinematically tense and disciplined, emotionally painful, enraging inspiring.

In the film, the eight flyers are not court-martialed but, in defiance of international law, are tried in a civil court before Axis journalists. They are not permitted to choose their attorney; a Princeton-educated Japanese is assigned them. The head judge is the Empire's political brain. The charge is murder. Grounds: the flyers bombed nonmilitary objectives and machined-gunned children. The purpose of the trial: to appease the Japanese people and to wring from the flyers the precise source of the attack.

On Captain Ross (Dana Andrews) the Japs.attempt no torture, learn nothing from him. Sergeant Skvoznik (Kevin )'Shea) is a former Ail-American, and nobody worries about his cracking. Torture reduces him to idiocy. Lieut. Bay-forth (Charles Russell) comes back to his cell with his mutilated hands concealed by black gloves. Lieut. Vincent (Donald Barry) survives with just enough mind left to stumble through snatches of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Then the Japs, in desperation, guarantee that the flyers will be treated as ordinary prisoners of war if they will specify the base for the raid. The alternative-execution. The flyers are strongly tempted. Using their wings and a vase, they hold a secret ballot. If one set of wings is broken they agree to tell. Every pair falls out of the vase intact. As they hear their death sentence two or three of the men, in the finest moment in the picture, find their faces irresistibly caught into strange proud, victorious smiles.

The film is gifted Director Lewis Milestone's best since All Quiet on the Western trout (1930). It is also extremely effective propaganda. But sober and well-informed cinemaddicts may have some doubts about it. The Purple Heart is fiction, but it is fiction about some still rather foggy historical facts. As it is very persuasively played, it is likely to be accepted as truth by a great many people not all of whom will be able to judge where fact ends and fiction begins.

*Flashed Columnist Walter Winchell last fortnight of Author Melville Grossman: "That's the nom de typewriter of Producer Darryl Zanuck." It is one of three generated when Zanuck was with Warner Bros. The others: Mark Canfield, Gregory Rogers. Reason: exhibitors objected to plethora of films credited to Darryl Zanuck. (In one year he scripted 19 films.)

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