G.l.s and Movies

What kind of movies do G.l.s like? Who are their favorite stars? Last week a poll by far-flung TIME correspondents disclosed the following preferences:

P: Almost without exception, G.l.s like musical comedies best, comedies next best, then adventure films and melodramas.

P: Without exception, G.I.'s most dislike tinhorn war and home-front heroics.

P: In direct ratio to their remoteness from civilization, soldiers prefer Betty Grable to all other women. They also strongly favor Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, Lena Home, Alice Faye, Ginny Sinims, Betty Hutton. Favorite dramatic actresses are Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson, Bette Davis.

P: In Britain, where women are a common sight, eleven male stars (Cinemactors Hope, Crosby, Tracy, Cagney, Gable, Bogart, Abbott & Costello, Rooney, Grant, Kaye) are as popular as any female. In Iceland, oddly enough, five males vie with Miss Grable.

There are some curious variants in cinematic taste. In India recent heavy favorites have been Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, both all-Negro musicals. In the Southwest Pacific the favorite film is Casablanca. Cover Girl, with Rita Hayworth, is a current favorite in Normandy. Documentaries are generally unpopular, but soldiers everywhere want more newsreels, even old ones, because of the glimpses they give of home. Many soldiers prefer old newsreels to new pictures, and a good old film still draws bigger G.I. audiences than a bad new one. In Rome, where a Red Cross movie man dug up an old print of It Happened One Night, in which Claudette Colbert still wears bangs, the film played to capacity houses thrice daily.

Hoots for Tantrums. Among war films only the Army's Why We Fight series and Screen Magazine are generally liked. But Destination, Tokyo has earned a certain respect, and A Guy Named Joe is well thought of in India. In Iceland, Hollywood's self-congratulatory Four Jills in a Jeep (TIME, April 3) ended abruptly when a crowd of G.l.s walked out on it. In Alaska, where Olivia De Havilland is normally very popular with G.l.s, they fiercely hooted her flag-waving tantrums at the end of Government Girl. Everywhere, G.l.s scan war films for technical errors to razz; and everywhere they reserve their most scathing cracks for pseudo-heroics.

Much of the booing, whistling and cracking is just a friendly salute to a well-filled sweater, or yumyummery for the love scenes. But there is nothing friendly about G.I. reactions to films which make the enemy look stupid or easily beaten. In Rome a G.I. said: "Stuff like Humphrey Bogart whipping a whole German armored-car column practically singlehanded gives us pains in the pratt, because that kind of crap gives the folks at home the wrong kind of idea about what we are up against." In the South Pacific, as one cinema hero mowed down the enemy like Superman at harvest home, G.l.s sprang to their feet yelling: "Wait a minute buddy, I'll help yah!" Then they shot up the screen.

No Rain Checks. But good & bad, old & new, movies are indispensable to G.l.s. At one remote base in India, they sat through three complete shows from 6 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. because the films had to be shown farther along next day. On New Britain, G.l.s, frustrated first by inadequate generator power, then by a slashing storm, came back three nights running before they managed finally, in their raincoats, to see a complete showing of The Hard Way. One G.I. put it simply: "Without movies we'd go nuts."

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