The New Pictures

Battle Hymn (Universal-International) pictures the Korean war as a sort of Sunday-school outing at which some of the boys got a little out of hand. The hero (Rock Hudson) is Colonel Dean Hess, an Ohio parson (Disciples of Christ) who in real life flew 62 missions as a fighter pilot in World War II, then rejoined the Air Force when the Korean war broke out, and was ticketed to train the new-fledged ROK air force. The colonel found that his soldier's duty still left him enough time to satisfy his Christian conscience--by founding a home for war orphans and setting up an airlift that carried about a thousand of them to it.

In the picture, Actor Hudson spends most of his time exercising the vocabulary of uplift ("Your good deeds are your purest prayers") with the local Confucius (Philip Ahn), and conferring candy bars on an incredibly clean and healthy-looking horde of refugee Korean children. In fact the picture is so ineffably high-minded that the heroine (Anna Kashfi) never finds herself in anything more exciting than the hero's alms. He sends her candy bars too. By the time the lights finally go up, the sugar count of this picture is so dangerously high that theater managers might be well advised to offer insulin shots in the lobby.

Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (20th Century-Fox) is a dull consulting-room comedy, but a brilliant illustration of what is wrong with most jokes about psychoanalysis. People who have not laid themselves on the couch are hardly in a position to get the joke, while people who get up from it have generally lost their sense of humor on the subject. Nonetheless, Edward Chodorov's play had a startling success in Manhattan, where the largest group of U.S. psychoanalysts lives and practices--apparently as a sort of cut-rate abreaction for those who agree with Sam Goldwyn that "anybody who would go to a psychoanalyst ought to have his head examined." Yet as a film, it will probably confuse the millions to whom an analysis is something that comes back from the laboratory the doctor sent the bottle to.

The confusion centers in the analyst (David Niven), the figure whose bubble reputation the satiric point is apparently intended to prick. But the bubble is never blown; from the first scene, Niven is represented as little more than a passive scratching-post for a pack of pampered cats. But suddenly, in the last scenes, he turns into the father image--sober, sound, sententious, and yet as modern as a cubist grandfather's clock. In the meantime, the moviegoer has weltered through a series of vaguely amusing scenes that go nowhere almost as fast as the well-known labyrinth dream.

The general company (Dan Dailey, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Rush) is quite pleasant, and Tony Randall in his best scene provides a hilarious footnote to an era in which the lounge lizard has been replaced by the couch cowboy.

The Wings of Eagles (MGM) is a massively expensive sentimental gesture, involving about $2,600,000 worth of hearts and flowers, prepared by Director John Ford and Actor John Wayne in tribute to the memory of their friend, a prominent screenwriter named Commander Frank ("Spig") Wead, who died in 1947. Starting adult life as a naval aviator, Commander Wead joined the daredevil team that brought the Schneider Cup to the U.S. for the first time in 1923.* Wead himself once set five world records with Lieut. John Price, and at 30, he became (according to studio publicity) the youngest squadron commander in the Navy's history.

At 30, however, Wead fell down a short flight of steps--in the movie, Actor Wayne crashes down about 20 of them, scattering staves like matchsticks--and broke his neck. The doctors said he would never move his legs again, and the Navy retired him. But Wead had an invincible will to get well. For the better part of five years he lay helplessly in bed, driving the life "back into his limbs by sheer force of determination, until at last, with the help of two canes, he was able to walk.

Unable to fly, Annapolisman Wead supported himself by writing about flying, mostly for the movies. Dirigible, Hell Divers, Test Pilot, Ceiling Zero, Dive Bomber and a dozen other pictures made him a well-paid, well-known man, a sort of Secretary of Aviation in Hollywood's ruling circles. In World War II Wead wangled active duty, hobbled about the flight decks of the Pacific with his neck in a steel brace, and won the Legion of Merit for his theory of the supporting carrier, a major contribution to Pacific strategy.

Obviously, Frank Wead's story is worth telling--but hardly the way Ford & Co. tell it. They turn his naval career into a bell-bottom farce, his marriage (to Maureen O'Hara) into a pointlessly unpleasant shore-leave shenanigan, and they simplify the commander's character to the point where even Actor Wayne has to play down to his part.

*The international seaplane speed trophy was actually won by Lieut. David Rittenhouse, one of Wead's teammates.

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