The New Pictures, Apr. 12, 1943

( Desert Victory (British Army Film & Photographic Unit—20th Century-Fox) is the finest film of actual combat that has come out of this war. It was made as a routine British War Office assignment; it covers Montgomery’s brilliant African campaign, last autumn and winter, which opened at El Alamein and ended 1,300 miles to the west in Tripoli. It is a good record of this action ; it is so good a record because it is a great deal more. The task might have fallen to any competent film director. But because it came to intelligent, diffident, Hollywood-trained Scotsman David MacDonald, a British Army lieutenant colonel, the result is a first-rate work of art.

Sample episode: the time is Oct. 23, 1942. The place is a stretch of desert before El Alamein. Two armies face each other which for two months have been recreating themselves in manpower and in material. The last preparations for combat intensify, and grow quiet. In blank black, a calm voice speaks: At Zero-minus-thirty the barrage begins. At the same moment the sappers will move for ward. . . . At 10 o’clock the infantry will advance. In quiet and darkness a single file of helmeted sappers goes up the line; next, bayonet-bearing infantry, slowly, then faster. These are not actors. The faces are childlike rather than grim; be wildered, never fierce. Then the artillery command is barked, shouted, repeated, roared, amplified: FIRE! The barrage has begun.

Annihilation Amplified. Director MacDonald screens this night barrage by projecting its actual gun flashes while amplifying such staggering noise, for such a long film stretch (four and a half minutes) that few in any audience will not wish to get out of it. It is meant to be almost unbearable, and is. By placement, timing and delivery, this is also the most intelligent passage in the picture.

Many such skillfully handled episodes make up Desert Victory. Twenty-six cameramen photographed it. They selected characteristic, telling aspects of faces, bodies, machines and desert heat—and painstakingly avoided melodramatic distortions. MacDonald’s cameramen were armed with pistols as well as cameras, but appear to have taken his suggestion that, if ever they were near enough to the enemy to use their guns, it was their business to use the camera. Of the 26, four were killed, seven were wounded, six were captured.

The editing of the film is as creditable as the photography. MacDonald and his associates in London reduced 200,000 exposed feet into an order, flow and sequence as moving as well-written music. The commentary, both in its style and in its delivery, is a model for nonfiction films; it never intrudes on what is seen, is always economically informative.

Shy Scotsman. Born near Edinburgh in 1904, son of an engineer, David MacDonald started out in rubber planting in Malay. In 1929, when depression wrung that business dry, an earlier interest in stage and films took him to Hollywood. There a break plus his abilities got him jobs under Directors Cecil De Mille, King Vidor, Henry Hathaway and Raoul Walsh, with whom he went to London in 1937.

In London, as a full director, MacDonald made the documentary Men of the Lightship, turned out a dozen or so successful and forgettable potboilers, filmed the blitz fires of London from the dome of St. Paul’s. His shyness once drew from King Vidor an indirect compliment: “That guy would have been a top Hollywood director but he just didn’t know how to blow his own horn.” Said MacDonald last fortnight, to a preview group of film and pressmen: “These combat scenes can be done in Hollywood and you can do them very nicely, without loss of life. In making this film, there was loss of life. I think the film shows it.”

Cabin In The Sky (M.G.M.) is an all-star Negro musical with handsome, luscious-voiced Lena Home (TIME, Jan. 4), Ethel Waters, “Rochester,” Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Hall Johnson’s singers. Like many star-filled pictures, this one never really shows off its crowded heavens. The Negroes are apparently regarded less as artists (despite their very high potential of artistry) than as picturesque, Sambo-style entertainers.

This tendency, not confined to Hollywood, old in American life, is encouraged by a plot which has a flavoring of The Green Pastures fantasy, but little real resemblance to that subtle and tender masterpiece. The story takes Little Joe Jackson (“Rochester”) and his wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) through Joe’s moral predicaments, including a nightclub scorcher named Georgia Brown (Lena Horne), on his way to a needle’s-eye squeeze into heaven. M.G.M. adds insult to insensitivity by issuing a pretentious screen-print foreword of legend sources and race dreams: “The folklore of America has origins in … all races, all colors. This story . . . seeks to capture those values.”

The best things in the picture are a rebuke to all kinds of pretentiousness. Many in the audience will gladly settle for the dancing of the great John “Bubbles” Sublett when he takes to his hat and stick and staircase while Ellington plays his gaudy arrangement of Shine.