The New Pictures

The Tattered Dress (Universal-International) is a courtroom melodrama. The hero (Jeff Chandler), cast as "the greatest trial lawyer since Clarence Darrow," is a sort of jukebox genius who will sing almost any tune for almost anybody who provides the coin. When a young hellionaire (Philip Reed) murders his wife's boy friend. Lawyer Chandler finagles an acquittal. For the next hour or so the pattern of the plot looks like something perpetrated by a drunken silkworm. Is the sheriff (Jack Carson) the crook? Is the hero the villain? Is the lawyer the defendant? Does anybody care? Actor Chandler seems to care deeply, because he tries so hard, but his performance never really hits the target. He cannot seem to distinguish between beau and Darrow.

Men in War (Security Pictures; United Artists). "They can't do that!" spluttered Colonel Blimp as the Japanese raced through the supposedly impassable jungles of Malaya in 1941. "It's against the rules of war!" The U.S. Army, which recently made a similar protest to the makers of this movie, now seems to have been guilty of a similar Blimpertinence. The script was condemned, and all Army assistance denied to its producers, because several scenes contained "incidents against regulations''--notably incidents in which a renegade sergeant disputes (though he does not disobey) the authority of a lieutenant. But if Men in War does not always conform to the prim letter of the Army manual, it holds to the raw spirit of combat as hard as any dogface clutches his rifle.

Korea, Sept. 6. 1950. The North Koreans have broken through the Naktong line. An American platoon is isolated, surrounded. Says the lieutenant (Robert Ryan): "We walk out." Then comes a stroke of luck. A jeep comes roaring across an open field. Passengers: a bitter, combat-weary sergeant (Aldo Ray), and his shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith), debris of a distant battle. The lieutenant takes over the jeep at gunpoint, loads the ammo on it, forces the sergeant to march with the platoon to Hill 465. But is the divisional HQ still there?

Enemy mines haphazard the roads, enemy mortars control the passes, enemy snipers infest the fields. In 15 miles the lieutenant loses two men, and when he gets to Hill 465. he finds--enemy machine-gun nests. The picture ends with a battle for a hill that probably means nothing to either side.

The film has its weaknesses. S.O.P. aside, the relations between the lieutenant and the sergeant are literary, to say the least. But the characters are not. They typify believably the two best kinds of fighting men. The lieutenant is the steady, intelligent, responsible leader of men; the sergeant is the gifted killer. On Director, Anthony Mann's restraining leash, Actors Ryan and Ray work with a held-back intensity that admirably suggests the low-grade, chronic anxiety that fighting men run like a fever.

The onlooker catches the fever, and with his camera Director Mann works insidiously to drive it up. Never for an instant does he let the moviegoer escape from the appalling situation the platoon is in. Never for an instant does the moviegoer know where he is--or where They are. He marches, hides, fights, watches every minute with the fighting men, and the watching is the worst. For as the watcher stares down his gunsights into the bright summer grasses, and the sun and the wind play mazily together in the barley and field flowers, and the watcher goes on waiting and waiting for death to leap at him out of the purest loveliness, there comes a moment when any averagely sensitive person will begin to get that cold sensation along his spine, and to realize a little how a fighting man feels when he is buying a Section Eight.

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