The New Pictures

Bombers B-52 (Warner) is a $1,400,000 want ad for Air Force technicians--the ground crews needed to keep 'em flying in the Strategic Air Command. SAC being what it is, a powerful discouragement to missile warfare, audiences might be prepared by recent headlines to take the picture seriously. It therefore comes as a shock when the customer finds himself sniggering through scene after scene, not only at Karl Malden, who gives a funny and often touching performance as a master sergeant, but also at some of the most extravagant recruiting promises that have been made since Mohammed dangled before his warriors a vision of the houris of paradise.

Up to a point, the picture makes promises the Air Force can hope to keep. Hero Malden is shown as a man who works an eight-hour day, owns a pretty little ranch house near the base, and sleeps there every night with a mighty attractive wife (Marsha Hunt). He has an automobile, a TV set, beer in the icebox, a pension in prospect, a month's vacation every year, and enough cash in his pocket to finance it. Thanks to his Air Force training, he knows he can walk into a big-pay position in the aircraft industry any time he decides to quit the service. On top of that, the sergeant, who is a line chief, has the satisfaction of doing a job that is vital to his country's survival, and on top of that he has the pleasure of rigging the craziest kite a grown-up boy ever had: the $9,000,000, 400,000-lb., eight-jet, 650-m.p.h. B-52.

The sergeant's life looks like a piece of cake, all right, but then the scriptwriter starts to apply the Hollywood icing, and what glop it is. The sergeant has hardly anything to do with ordinary enlisted men, spends most of his time giving unsolicited advice to colonels and generals, who seem enormously impressed and grateful. The C.O. of his squadron, a lieutenant colonel (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), falls in love with the sergeant's daughter (Natalie Wood), but the sarge does not think the colonel is good enough for his girl. So one day at the base he chews the C.O. out and threatens to quit the Air Force if the thing doesn't stop. The colonel turns pale. The general turns pale. They realize only too well that without the sarge the preparation of the B-52 for combat will be seriously delayed, and without the B-52 ... In short, it is all pretty silly in an amiable way.

Paths of Glory (Bryna; United Artists), made 20 years ago, might have found a sympathetic audience in a passionately pacifist period, might even have been greeted as a minor masterpiece. Made today, it leaves the spectator often confused and numb, like a moving speech in a dead language.

The picture is based on the late Humphrey Cobb's novel, a bestseller in 1935 and one of the most powerful antimilitaristic tracts inspired by World War I. The story tells what happened before, during and after an attack by a French regiment on the Western Front. The attack was suggested by the corps commander (Adolphe Menjou) merely as a means of fortifying his personal reputation. It was ordered by the division commander (George Macready). mostly out of vanity and the desire to ingratiate. The attack was impossible from the start, and it failed disastrously--one whole company, for instance, was cut down even before the men could reach their own barbed-wire defenses.

Wild with rage and humiliation, the division commander orders French artillery to fire on French troops who have taken refuge in their own trenches. The artillery officer refuses -- twice. Now almost insane with frustration and sick grandeurs, the division commander runs to the corps commander and howls for blood: the trial of ten men from each company on the capital charge of cowardice. "If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones!" Thanks principally to the regimental colonel (Kirk Douglas), who spiritedly defends his men, only three of them are brought to trial. One is chosen by lot, another because his lieutenant hates him, the third because he was "a social undesirable" in civilian life.

The court-martial is a farce. No written indictment is presented. No witnesses are permitted for the defense. No stenographic record of the proceedings is kept. The men are sentenced to death. When the colonel protests, the corps commander tells him not to worry. "There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating [to a soldier] than seeing someone else die." And so the men are executed. To what effect? Within an hour of the execution, the regiment is watching a pretty girl in a boite, and has apparently forgotten that the three men ever existed.

This appalling tale is told in a lean and sinewy screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, and the script is shot with impressive skill and restraint by Director Kubrick (TIME, June 4, 1956), a 29-year-old New Yorker who gives promise of unusual cinematic talent. Not every young director could put Menjou so handsomely through his paces; and few directors of whatever age could put the bit so firmly in the teeth of a performer like Douglas and keep him running true to character. The film's only real mistake: it attacks an unfashionable devil.

Zero Hour (Bartlett-Champion; Paramount) is based on a horrifying idea that has surely come to many an airline passenger at that painful moment when the pretty stewardess betrays him with his dinner. What if everybody on the plane--the crew as well as the passengers--should suddenly come down with acute indigestion? Who would fly the plane? This script, the somewhat bloopy inflation of a 1956 television show, meets the suspense requirement by providing a passenger-pilot (Dana Andrews) who may not be sick to his stomach but who is certainly sick in the head. Actor Andrews is cast as the flight leader of an R.A.F. Spitfire squadron during World War II. a man who has lost his flying nerve, and who now stands to lose the lives of 41 people--including his wife (Linda Darnell) and child--if he does not get hold of himself in time to land the plane. The moral struggle comes off fairly well, but the general situation is as patently contrived as one of Walter Mitty's daydreams. The producers seem to have jumped, for want of a better idea, at what might be called the ptomaine chance.

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