Cinema: Two Heroes

The McConnell Story (Warners). Captain Joseph McConnell Jr., who at 31 became the world’s first triple jet ace (16 MIGs in nine months of Korean combat), was killed about a year ago at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., when he crashed in a jet fighter he was testing. This is his film biography, and it declares a ringing hail and farewell to the hero, with all the domestic and military taradiddle that Hollywood finds necessary on such occasions. This time, unfortunately, the mixture contains a little more than the absolutely necessary amount of bad taste.

According to the script, Captain McConnell (played with rubbery insensitivity by Alan Ladd) was emotionally the sort of cheerful Neanderthal who proposed to his wife at a prizefight, called her “Butch,” and treated her like a meddling parent that he continually had to outwit. The wife (played by June Allyson, who has recently provided the ball-and-chain for almost every picture she appears in) is presented in turn as a relentless good sport who makes her home in one plywood horror after another, spends half her time in heart-rending goodbyes, and keeps muttering sub-hysterically, “Sweetheart, don’t worry about me.”

She, of course, worries herself satchel-eyed about him, and not without reason. When he gets his hands on the stick of a jet, he looks as if he were holding a hashish lollipop, and he sighs: “Now I know how the angels feel!” Down on the ground his instructor (James Whitmore) breathes a blessing: “Show ’em up, tiger! You own the sky.” All of this naturally makes Airman McConnell seem a bit of a sap as well as a lot of a hero, and strongly suggests that the Air Force itself is just a shining-faced troop of hi-octane Boy Scouts on an overnight hike to Cloud 8. In fairness to the producers, it has to be said that they meant better than they made; nevertheless, The McConnell Story is an instance in which simple human dignity has been clobbered by commercial cuteness.

To Hell and Back (Universal) features Audie Murphy, glamourpuss, in the story of Audie Murphy, dogface. Inevitably, the boy seems to be tooting his own tommy gun a bit too loud, but then who else in Hollywood is qualified to play the part of the most decorated soldier in U.S. history—a boy who, at 20, had won every combat medal in the book, from Purple Heart (four times) to Congressional Medal of Honor.

To Hell and Back begins its tale in the rural slums of North Texas, where Audie and eight other children were raised, mostly by their mother; the father ran out on the family when Audie was twelve. The boy quitschool and went to work on a farm, and at 17 he enlisted in the Army. The Marines and the Navy had turned down the skinny little geezer as unfit for combat, and when he got to North Africa the boys in his platoon shook their heads. “That’s real fresh meat, huh? . . . It’s going to take two strong men to take care of him in action.”

It took, as a matter of historic fact, more strong men than the Wehrmacht could provide. Audie took to soldiering like a shark to mullet. He was cool and quick, and when his Irish was up he laid about him like Kevin o’ the Bogs. The picture makes this plain in combat scenes which could never have been napalmed off as the real thing without Audie. Credibility, burns in his mild face and gentle gestures as he moves through scenes of battle raptly, like a man reliving them with wonder and something of reverence. And just for a nervous instant, now and then, the moviegoer glimpses, in the figure of this childlike man, the soul-chilling ghost of all the menlike children of those violent years, who hovered among battles like avenging cherubs, and knew all about death before they knew very much about life.