The New Pictures

Molly (Paramount) brings The Goldbergs to the screen after a 21-year career in radio, vaudeville, comic strip, legitimate theater and television. As always, The Goldbergs spices its doughy lumps of linguistic comedy and tearful drama with an authentic flavor of Jewish family life in The Bronx, binds them with the hopes, frailties and loyalties common to all families.

Bighearted Molly Goldberg (played, as usual, by Author Gertrude Berg) still rules her clan with the same firm but pliant hand that stirs the big pots forever simmering on her stove. She never runs out of soup for the neighbors, malapropisms for the audience, or schemes for rearranging other people's lives. This time, almost wrecking her husband Jake (Philip Loeb) in the process, she regroups a romantic quadrangle involving an overage suitor and his pink-cheeked fiancee, a middle-aged widow and an eligible young man.

The picture follows the episodic TV format so closely that a moviegoer can spot the likely gaps for commercials.

Operation Pacific (Warner) carries two forms of box-office insurance: a war subject (see below) and popular He-Man John Wayne. It is the kind of movie that needs all the insurance it can get. Writer-Director George Waggner has grafted a tiresome love v. duty romance on to the well-tried story of U.S. submarine exploits.

In alternating sequences, Lieut. Commander Wayne tries to sink enemy ships and salvage his duty-wrecked marriage with burning-eyed Navy Nurse Patricia Neal. Actor Wayne's flinty authority as a man of action crumbles under the trite situations and dialogue ashore. For comic relief, the picture rings in the disheveled aftermath of the enlisted men's shore leave, a scene that plays much better where it played earlier, in Broadway's Mister Roberts.

What should be Operation Pacific's strongest point proves its major disappointment: the action at sea. The script makes Wayne's submarine do everything that a submarine can (and perhaps, a moviegoer may suspect, some things that it cannot). But the fighting takes place on the bravado level of an adventure story, e.g., Wayne dives overboard to swim to the rescue of a downed fighter pilot. Even on that level, the film develops little suspense. By applying realism to technical jargon rather than to such essentials as character, mood and incident, the picture never conveys the submariners' sense of danger, confinement and (except unintentionally) deadly boredom. --

For almost four years after World War II's end, Hollywood would as soon have made war movies as sown minefields in front of U.S. box offices. Then MGM's Battleground broke the jinx and, with Sands of I wo Jima and Twelve 0'Clock High, landed among the first ten moneymakers of 1950. Now the studios are releasing and shooting so many war films that faithful moviegoers may soon feel eligible for battle stars.

Stealing a march on his bigger rivals, Independent Producer Robert Lippert has already issued The Steel Helmet, the first movie based on the Korean fighting. Though it features a strikingly Mauldin-like performance by Newcomer Gene Evans as a battered infantryman, the film constantly betrays its quickie origin, leaves the field wide open to such forthcoming pictures as RKO's The Korean Story, Eagle Lion Classics' Korea Patrol, Columbia's A Yank in Korea. Also on the way, celebrating other wars and warriors: MGM's Go for Broke, Paramount's The Submarine Story, 20th Century-Fox's The Frog Men, Republic's Fighting U.S. Coast Guard, Universal-International's Up Front and Air Cadet, RKO's Jet Pilot and Flying Leathernecks.

At War with the Army (Paramount) was not much of a play on Broadway in 1949, but Scripter-Producer Fred F. Finklehoffe's film version shows that it could have been much worse. The training-camp farce now serves as a vehicle for Comics Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and their ragbag of nightclub bits & pieces.

The film's plot, however feeble, is enough to cramp the free-style wackiness of Martin & Lewis. In turn, their witless routines put a blight on whatever slim fun the play once offered in situations and dialogue. Between straight-man chores, Crooner Martin imitates Bing Crosby in the picture's songs, including one that gets billing as a Crosby imitation. Though he mugs, screeches, gyrates, even swishes through a female impersonation, Comedian Lewis sorely lacks one prop that has bolstered his success: a well-oiled nightclub audience.

Grounds for Marriage (MGM) dishes up some farcical leftovers about a divorcee (Kathryn Grayson) on the make for her ex-husband (Van Johnson). The dialogue and plot maneuvers are determinedly labeled for comedy and remarkably scant of laughs. Since Opera Singer Grayson develops voice trouble and Physician Johnson is a nose & throat specialist with an uppity fiancee (Paula Raymond), any bobby-soxer should be able to triangulate the solution.

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