The New Pictures

Mr. Winkle Goes to War (Columbia) is a sentimental tale of a meek, 44-year-old, henpecked, workaday bank clerk suddenly caught up by the seat of his well-shined pants and plunged into the workaday reality of modern war.

Wilbert Winkle, having demonstrated budding heroism by breaking out of his bank cage and starting a fix-it shop in his garage, can be counted on by experienced movie-goers to bloom properly when transplanted from Benton, Calif, to the South Pacific. He does, by wiping out a machine-gun nest with a bulldozer, and comes home a hero even to his wife. Mr. Winkle has its moving moments, but the total effect is about as convincing as if professional tough guy Edward G. Robinson were to play the part of the mild little bank clerk--which he does.

I Love a Soldier (Paramount) treats frivolously a not -altogether - frivolous theme. An enticing young shipyard worker (Paulette Goddard) spends her days welding metal ships, her nights welding soldiers' hearts. Meantime she clings to the notion that a young woman should consider it her duty to kiss the boys goodbye, but hardly ever do much else for them.

When her regeneration is effected through the efforts of a lonely, affection-hungry young soldier (Sonny Tufts) just back from 14 months overseas and separated from his wife, it seems hardly worth the effort. The petulant Miss Goddard confesses her love for boyish, big-boned Tufts early in the picture. But he is required to pursue her through the better part of twelve reels, putting up patiently with her censorious attitude toward his broken marriage, laughing off her impulsive escapades with other men, listening cheerfully while she excuses herself from responsibility to him by explaining that a girl doesn't reap full measure from marriage in wartime, and, in general, sampling nearly every indignity capable of being inflicted on man by woman.

For his persistence this durable G.I. is rewarded, after his divorce at picture's end, with a woman who (as conceived by Producer-Director Mark Sandrich) has neither head nor heart, nobility nor warmth.

As comedy, I Love a Soldier suffers from a confusion of values, which is likely to outrage rather than amuse most moviegoers. Barry Fitzgerald contributes a brief but telling bit as a richly impertinent, elfish little cable-car gripman (conductor). But despite his efforts, this idyll of young love resembles not so much a spring freshet as a saucer of milk left to sour by an ungrateful cat.

British Imperialism--1944 (MARCH OF TIME) is a meandering, optimistic survey of the geopolitical entity which Britons call "the widest system of organized freedom in the world" and which Winston Churchill intends to keep on calling the British Empire. Examining India, the film forthrightly includes shots of native police wielding their cudgels on a riotous city mob. But it also looks at schools, hospitals, factories and irrigation projects, asserts that India has benefited from British rule and may gradually win full Dominion status. Further glimpses of air-minded Canada, industrially ambitious Australia, contentedly agrarian New Zealand, rich, up-&-coming South Africa, lead M.O.T. to conclude that old loyalties will be maintained (along with new ones to the U.S.), old grievances will be resolved, the British Empire will prosper and endure.

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