The New Pictures

A Medal for Benny (Paramount) rates a medal for Paramount. The first reels of this John Steinbeck story are a little ripe with folksiness, but along about the middle the picture comes vividly to life.

It is a story about one of the minor U.S. minorities--California's Paisanos, the indigent descendants of the original Indians and Spanish settlers. One of them, an amiable no-good (Arturo de Cordova), is trying to make time with a young woman (Dorothy Lamour) who is interested only in her boy friend Benny, at war in the Pacific. Between failures with her, the no-good succeeds in some fine gypping of Benny's naive old father (J. Carrol Naish).

As the story develops, it becomes clear that the absent Benny is a five-star heel, whose only possible usefulness to the community is martial. This fact and the picture itself suddenly become interesting when a wire informs the small-town bigwigs that they had bred a hero: Benny has killed 100-odd Japanese, died in the act, and posthumously been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The go-getters go mad with civic joy. A general and reporters and newsreel cameramen will arrive the next day; their town is on the national map and the profits, they believe, can be enormous. They whip up banners on which Benny's name appears much smaller than that of his birthplace. But they can't find Benny's family, to receive the medal and act as peg for the exploitation.

Benny's last name was Martin and by the time they realize, with horror, that it is pronounced Marteen and that Benny came from deep on the ineligible side of the tracks, they have very little time left to give him a creditable background. When they swoop on Benny's father, he thinks they have come in force to evict him for nonpayment of rent. When he finally realizes what the game is, the boosters, the general, the girl and the no-good have to work out their own solutions.

This second half of the picture is played with a rare amount of honest anger and courage. The local Chamber of Commerce go-getters are mercilessly rendered by Frank McHugh, Charles Dingle and Grant Mitchell; and J. Carrol Naish, who is clearly one of Hollywood's top actors, is a perfect foil for them. Yet the picture has one persistent weakness. If it were honest down to the ground, as it means to be, at least one of the boosters might have had serious misgivings.

The Great John L. (United Artists) is chiefly notable as Bing Crosby's first effort as a producer. It dutifully records the Boston Strong Boy (Greg McClure) as he rises to fame and florid magnanimity -- through his unhappy marriage with a betighted showgirl (Linda Darnell), his un happy love for a Boston girl (Barbara Britton), his still unhappier fondness for training on Black Velvet (champagne & stout) and the inevitable consequences at the hands of Jim Corbett. After that came his long, pitiful period as an alcoholic has-been and his ultimate salvation -- with the Boston lady's warm approval -- as a temperance lecturer at Chautauquas. The picture shows an uncommonly dogged desire to be honest about its hero's sorriest phase; it stages some very energetic socking matches; it ripples, like wheat under a wind machine, with brogue and assorted Irish sentiments; and it isn't a very good show.

The Way Ahead (Two Cities--20th Century-Fox), is a soft of dry-land equivalent of Noel Coward's famed In Which We Serve, tells with considerable force one of the real stories of modern war. The story: how a shuffling motley of unwilling conscripts, drawn from every walk of life, are transformed into proficient and brave infantrymen.

The eight conscripts of this British picture are painfully slow in breaking their civilian molds. 'Out of their early sullenness, bewilderment, arrogance and naivete, the producers have wrung convincing reality--and tempered it with genuine irony and humor. In putting it on the screen, a crew of excellent actors have more than exceeded the line of duty.

These men come to despise their sergeant (Billy Hartnell) so intensely that they formally charge him with abusing a martinet's privileges. But when the sergeant talks it over with his lieutenant (ex-star Lieut. Col. David Niven), you begin to realize just how much wisdom sometimes lies behind systematically rigid discipline. The sergeant's conclusion: "We haven't got a dud there, Sir."

For a long time though, the men continue to look and feel like duds. At a tea given by an R.A.F. pilot's mother-in-law, they crab interminably about their rotten treatment; and the gently experienced old lady replies, "O dear, it's a shame, isn't it? Who'll have another chocolate biscuit?" But it is in their worst failure that the men learn their best lesson. Deliberately "getting killed'' in order to loaf through a sham-battle, they already are soldiers enough to be ashamed of it.

The first great test of the men--and the bravura sequence of the picture--confronts them unexpectedly, en route to North Africa, when their ship is torpedoed. They pass the test because they have become, almost unknowingly, trained and efficient soldiers. It is much later, after a stretch of pure boredom, that they meet their first hand-to-hand test as warriors. As they advance toward it, bayonets fixed, the picture ends.

Unfortunately, The Way Ahead is thick with rubber stamps of British picturemaking. Good taste and good sense are too often dimmed by unimaginative treatment.

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