New Movies: Marshmallow Moratorium

O.K., says the Hollywood smart money, kids are buying antiwar, we’ll give them antiwar. And so there are movies like Hail, Hero.

A Western kid, Carl Dixon (Michael Douglas), goes AWOL from an Eastern college. He returns to the family ranch—a spread about the size of Rhode Island—to make an important announcement: he has enlisted in the Army to see if he can love the enemy up close as he does from afar. But nobody listens. Dad and Mom (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright) are too busy bickering. His crippled brother is off tomcatting around town, wishing he were fit enough to fight.

David Manber’s scenario, an unstable amalgam of early Arthur Miller and late James M. Barrie, gives the frustrated boy soliloquies that would make Peter Pan queasy. He calls his dog “noble steed,” plays mincing bullfighter to a pickup truck, decorates a barn with painted flowers—and finally floats off to war. But all is probably well. Presented with such a pixie, the Army could do nothing but shrug its shoulders and issue a medical discharge.

In appearance, Douglas is a green version of his father, Kirk. Whether he can act will remain a mystery until he appears in a movie. Hail, Hero is only a moratorium on sense and taste.