Cinema: The New Pictures: Jul. 29, 1940

The Ramparts We Watch is MARCH OF TIME’S first full-length feature. Its name, and nothing else, comes from Major George Fielding Eliot’s treatise on U. S. defense. In form it is the fullest flowering of two arts: the newsreel and MARCH OF TIME’S five-year-old discovery that people act like people, that the truest recreation of human beings is to be had by picturing people in the roles they play in life.

The story told by The Ramparts We Watch is that of a U. S. town and the people in it from 1914-1918. It shows what they were like, what they did, felt, said, hoped, how they argued, worked, fought, lived, died, made war and made peace. It offers no special pleading, grinds no economic or historical ax. Its thesis is the belief that nations, like individuals, cannot understand their present and their future unless they remember their past correctly, which the U. S. has a tendency not to do.

Sometown in the U. S. in 1914. learning that Archduke Ferdinand has been assassinated at Sarajevo, asks whether an archduke is like a prince. News of the mobilization of 17,000,000 Europeans is like the story of a distant railway wreck, a fire in a house far away. Then one day Joe Kovacs gets a letter with a foreign stamp, from Austria, and his wife brings it to him at work. Joe Kovacs’ class has been called, his fatherland has ordered him to arms, and Joe must go. At the Plaza Theatre that night, sitting with his neighbors for the last time, Joe sees the uniformed man with the withered arm jerkily strutting in a newsreel.

The roar of the big guns is muffled at first, gradually grows louder in Sometown. A $5 bill will feed a Belgian baby for a month. It is not Sometown’s fight. But in a rathskeller, the song Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier doesn’t sound right either. Mr. Averill didn’t raise his boy to be a soldier, but when Walter joins the Lafayette Escadrille, somehow Mr. Averill and Sometown are proud of him. Even the Bensinger girl, whose father teaches at the local college and wants his native Germany to win the war, is proud of Walter. To kindly, level-headed Editor Dan Meredith of The Day (John Adair) falls the task of giving Walter’s funeral elegy.

Then U-boat warfare, the sinking of the Lusitania, makes Sometown feel angry frustration, determined to do something. But Congressman John Lawton says there is only one thing to be done, and no one wants to go to war. As 1915 falls flaming into 1916, this is true, but Sometowns over the U. S. look toward thin-faced, worried Woodrow Wilson, about to marry Mrs. Gait. When Charles Evans Hughes quits the Supreme Court to run against Wilson, and almost wins, a period in history is already drawing to a close. Sometown’s main street sees its first Preparedness Day parade, and in Washington the parade is led by Wilson himself. At Sagamore Hill. Theodore Roosevelt loses his temper. Five thousand men a day are dying, England sweeps and Germany combs the seas, and Sometown and the U. S. lose their tempers too. The man who was too proud to fight begins to feel in his bones that the only question is When. The day is April 6. 1917.

As Sometown’s individual stories become those of a great nation at war, the aroused, single-minded U. S. writes a great story too. There are no ships, and then there is a ship built every day. There is no army, and then there are two million men in France, one in 20 destined not to come home again. The wheels are turning, the men are coming, faster & faster, when the tired men in Europe quit. Tired is Woodrow Wilson as he stands alone on the deck of the George Washington, setting out to write the story’s happy ending.

Mercifully hidden from him as he stand” are other moments that flash across the screen, the invasion of Manchuria, Ethiopia, the grey dawning of the world of Hitler. They are hidden too from Congressman John Lawton, his friend the editor, the other men and women of Some-town. But on New Year’s Eve, 1919, as the old Congressman raises a toast to generations unborn, he knows the end is not written yet. “May they hold the ramparts of our democracy and freedom.” says he quietly, “until kingdom come.”

Real as today, poignant as yesterday, interesting as tomorrow, The Ramparts We Watch was started 18 months before its premiere in Washington this week, cost $400.000 to make, and represents the most ambitious effort to date of MARCH OF TIME and its staff, headed by 41-year-old Louis de Rochemont, ex-Naval officer, ex-newsreel producer.

In its cast, from Wilhelm II and Woodrow Wilson down to the 1.400 people of New London, Conn, hired for the picture, none are professional cinemactors, all are as close to their real-life counterparts as possible. A believer in realistic casting since, aged 16 and on a newsreel assignment, he persuaded an officer to re-enact for his camera the arrest of Werner Horn for his attempt to blow up the international bridge at Vanceboro. Me.. Producer de Rochemont wanted no professionals, showed a sharp nose in detecting them among aspirants for the Ramparts cast. Professor Gustav Bensinger is Dr. Alfredo U. Wyss, a Swiss scientist who researched at the Pasteur Institute. His undergraduate son is an undergraduate at Brown. Congressman Lawton is Clarence Stowell, a teacher and lecturer who agreed with every line he spoke.

New London, home of Connecticut College for Women and the U. S. Coast Guard Academy, was selected for outdoor shooting because its exterior had changed little in appearance since 1914. There MOT set up headquarters in an abandoned silk mill rented at $150 a month. New London’s City Manager John Sheedy, who gave fullest cooperation, was startled when he returned one day from a trip to find a 1916 Preparedness Day parade going full blast through New London’s business section, local bigwigs established proudly in the reviewing stand.

Pride and Prejudice (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is Jane Austen’s malicious comedy about an aristocrat who falls in love with a girl who dislikes his arrogance as sincerely as he dislikes her mercenary mother and depressing family. To make this situation understandable to U. S. cinemaddicts of 1940, might have been impossible without the services of Actor Laurence Olivier. From the moment when he, as Mr. Darcy, walks into a ballroom in provincial Meryton with a memorable sneer, the picture is in.

To Darcy, the wit and spirit of Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) eclipse the distressing machinations of Mrs. Bennet (Mary Boland) in her search for rich husbands for her five marriageable daughters. He breaks up an unsuitable affair between Elizabeth’s sister and his friend Mr. Bingley, then with an air of misfortune announces that he is willing to make an unsuitable match himself. At which point, Austenites recall, Elizabeth gives him his comeuppance. Before Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice give way, some ob servers may find the going a little lacy.

Most will enjoy hearing from an excellent cast (including Edmund Gwenn, Edna May Oliver, Melville Cooper, Maureen O’Sullivan, Frieda Inescort) some of the most literate dialogue ever spoken on a sound track.

In adapting Helen Jerome’s dramatization of Miss Austen’s novel, able Screen writer Jane Murfin’s collaborator was Aldous Huxley, who went to California two years ago for eye treatments. He wrote a screen play for Garbo about Marie Curie which disappeared without a trace, supposedly because of family objections (Daughter Irene Joliot-Curie is thought to have feared that her father would be dwarfed by Garbo). Author Huxley, who has treated Hollywood with marked reserve, would like to write an original screen comedy. So far his only other product made in California is a grim, fantastic novel, After Many a Slimmer Dies The Swan (TIME, Jan. 29).