The New Pictures

A Walk in the Sun (Lewis Milestone-20th Century-Fox) is an accurate transposition to the screen of Harry Brown's slight, highly polished war novel. The story of an all but leaderless platoon of U.S. infantrymen, marching the few miles from an Italian beachhead to their objective, a Nazi-infested farmhouse, has fine dramatic unity and enough signs of life to hold the eye. The dialogue is 200-proof literary corn; the background music, a synthetic folk-song sung like a lullaby, is deplorable. But the story's lack of pretension and a number of good unactorish performances make A Walk in the Sun one of the best in the current spate of war films.

All the characters in A Walk are almost too easy to identify: each personality wears a simple, colorful, unmistakable tag. Rivera is always bumming a cigarette; Windy is composing an unwritten letter to his sister; Archimbeau is forever grumbling about the coming Battle of Tibet; two other privates are always discussing Satevepost art. This rigid apportioning of words and mannerisms makes each character seem oddly single-faceted. The conversations never get beyond the starting line and the story of the marching men becomes an interlocking series of running gags.

Dana Andrews, as a sergeant who finds himself in command of the platoon, is notable for a quiet, forceful performance. In spite of the artiness of its presentation, the film has excitement and some feeling of reality. But for all its brave effort, A Walk never succeeds in being much more than a chamber-music arrangement of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Snafu (Columbia) is a comedy about a boy who lied to the recruiting office to get into the Army and then became a problem-veteran at the age of 15 1/2. His return from the wars throws his family into a farcical uproar. Snafu may well be the first in a long line of comedies about returning soldiers. The fact that this film's hero is extraordinarily young makes most of the humor fresh and innocent, and the occasional pathos effective. Actor Conrad Janis, a 17-year-old screen newcomer, scowls as Ronald, the veteran; the late Robert Benchley is affable as the harassed father.

Ronnie returns from the South Pacific with a bagful of gruesome trophies, a disenchanted view of marriage and highly developed skill at judo. When a jovial Legionnaire slaps him on the back, Ronnie, with an automatic judo reflex, tosses him over one shoulder. When a plane passes over the house during a scene of young love, Ronnie grabs his girl and ducks for shelter. The film finally degenerates into a routine addition to, the Henry Aldrich plot.

Originally a stage play, Snafu tends to be cramped and stagey in its action. Most of the difficulties take place inside Ronnie's house, in a typical stage living room with a French door back center, leading to a patio and thence to oblivion. One good stage trick is kept: a hypochondriac grandmother, never seen by the audience, raps fiercely on the floor of her bedroom whenever she wants attention.

San Antonio (Warner) is a cow-country version of Robin Hood, doubly glamorized by Errol Flynn and Technicolor.

Flynn starts things off with a bang by swinging himself feet first through the window of a stagecoach to exchange amenities with beautiful Alexis Smith. Like most lovely ladies in current Westerns, she is on her way to sing in a saloon. The saloon is full of Errol's enemies. The shooting starts when he hits town, and doesn't stop until he has killed one villain on an ink-blue night in the Alamo and smashed another's head against a rock.

The picture's musicomic extravagance is spiced with good details: a jaunty Mexican boy who makes his way across the street in the sun; a cat that drinks hard liquor from a jigger on the bar; a Southern-accented parrot that drawls "How y'all?"; an upright piano that slides downstairs during a barroom brawl.

The rattle of gunfire does not seem to disturb Alexis Smith, who saunters detachedly through the proceedings in sleekly cut satin, singing pink-gingham songs. Flynn, looking less like a cowboy than a romantic adventurer, swaggers along in the steps of the elder Fairbanks, sometimes two at a time.

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