The New Pictures, Sep. 28, 1942

The Battle of Midway (20th Century-Fox) should be seen by all Americans. Here are the first official shots of U.S. troops in actual combat, pictures of the young, tense, grinning, lean, clean, finedrawn faces of American boys before, during and after a great and terrible battle. The impact is quick as a wound and deep as loneliness.

Commander John Ford, U.S.N.R. (director of The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, etc.) crouched three 16-mm. cameras in the sands of Midway. Much film was ruined by bomb concussion. Two of the cameras were destroyed. Ford was knocked unconscious, wounded. The result is a first-class failure to film the most difficult of all actions—a battle—but a brave attempt to make a record—quick, jerky, vivid, fragmentary, luminous—of a moment of desperate peril to the nation.

The film opens with semi-travelogue shots of the serene little coral reef that is Midway, of the gulls, gonies and Marines that live there, passes on to the alarm from the lazing patrol planes at sea, watches the huge khaki Flying Fortresses trundle heavily off the runways, the men moving with the deceptive leisure of Americans—and then come the Japs.

In the oily blue-blackness of smoke, the strange black flowers and white streamers painted on the sky by planes and bursting ack-ack, the mortal brilliance of blood—Technicolor vindicates the remark made about it at its birth a decade ago that “Now Hollywood is ready to film the Last Judgment.” The film jumps crazily when the bombs rock the Hand; and the camera shifts again & again to the faces of two young Marines firing an anti-aircraft gun—not in fear, not in bloodthirst, but only intently, the way an outfielder watches a fly ball.

The commentary is often corny and certainly this is not by any stretch the story of the whole Battle of Midway. But history would be a different matter if there had been a few such sketchy pictures of Austerlitz, of Jutland, of Gettysburg and Verdun.

My Sister Eileen (Columbia) was made from the play which was made from the stories by Ruth McKenney. It is a brisk sister act on one of the century’s favorite comic themes—that of the two young women from the sticks, one plain and smart, the other lovely and not so smart, who try their luck in the metropolis.

Plain Sister Ruth (Rosalind Russell) and lovely Sister Eileen (Janet Blair) leave Columbus, Ohio for a basement apartment in Greenwich Village and literary and stage careers respectively. Work on an incipient subway rocks the floor every few minutes. A dog mistakes the bars of their window for a comfort station. A seasonally unemployed professional footballer sleeps in their kitchenette to avoid his mother-in-law. Sister Ruth interests a magazine editor (Brian Aherne) in her copy and person. Sister Eileen innocently entices into their manic ménage their landlord (George Tobias), a Harpo-Marxian painter with delusions of genius; the Harold-Teenish manager of a drugstore; a crafty reporter (Allyn Joslyn); six lighthearted cadets from the Portuguese merchant marine. Eileen’s global charms inspire the sailors to do a mass conga that lands her in jail. At last Sister Ruth’s stories about Sister Eileen are accepted for publication. Eileen stays on as indispensable source material.

Rosalind Russell handles Sister Ruth’s wit & wisdom with the neat feeling for bias on which she tailors her comic flair. Newcomer Janet Blair, as Sister Eileen, is as fetching as a soda-fountain special at the end of a hot day. Male cinemaddicts will regard her as so much guileless natural force disguised in sprigged muslin. Her prototype, Eileen McKenney, was killed (with her husband, Novelist Nathaniel West) in an auto crash (TIME, Jan. 6, 1941).

The War Against Mrs. Hadley

(M.G.M.) is an all-out Hollywood jihad to save Fay Bainter’s soul for the New Deal. Cinemactress Bainter impersonates the widow of an anti-New Deal Washington newspaper publisher. She has vague resemblances to the Washington Times-Herald’s Cissie Patterson, an overstuffed mansion, an illusory heart ailment, a raffish son (Richard Ney), a musical-comedy daughter (Jean Rogers) and. though the epithet is never directly hurled, there is more than a hint that the Widow Bainter is a Republican. The war against her is waged with practically everything but brass knuckles and a commando raid. It proceeds by a series of psychological crises. Some of them:

> Her best friend (Edward Arnold), a “stanch Republican” who is a War Department big shot, refuses to save her son from the draft.

> Her harebrained friend (Spring Byington) disloyally practices first aid under the auspices of a detested New Deal publisher’s wife (Isobel Elsom).

The Widow Bainter takes refuge in dignified solitude with the Clivedenish family doctor (Miles Mander) and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, but the boardinghouse brogue of her son-in-law’s Irish mother (Sara Allgood), her daughter’s expected baby, her son’s citation for valor flank her personal Maginot Line. Before she can say OCD, she finds herself boss of the bandage brigade.

This strange story and its performance (it is billed as “the American Mrs. Miniver”) fit each other like gloves without hands in them. Fay Bainter succeeds against hopeless odds in making her absurd part plausible. So does Miles Mander, as the neurasthenic doctor. There are moments of high farce when the air-warden butler gets mixed up with Spring Byington (in her bedroom) during a blackout, and when the Widow Bainter wanders in on a kind of middle-aged seraglio scene with first-aiders all wound up in one another’s bandages. Otherwise, high seriousness is the note, of which the most vibrant tone is Mrs. Hadley’s remark after reading President Roosevelt’s letter about her son’s valor. “Oh, to think,” quavers Mrs. Hadley, licked indeed, “of his finding time to write to me, with all the things he has to do. . . .”

The Major and the Minor (Paramount) introduces a pigtailed, devastatingly personable Ginger Rogers to a military school full of precociously amatory cadets. With all due respect to Brother Rat (TIME, Nov. 7, 1938), The Major and the Minor is possibly the best fun ever gotten out of such an institution. Ginger Rogers turns in the prettiest piece of work she has done.

Ginger Rogers as Susan (Susu) Applegate takes to pigtails in order to buy a half-fare ticket to Stevenson, Iowa. She wants to escape Manhattan mashers like Robert Benchley. Unsuspecting Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland) protects her from highly suspicious trainmen, takes her to spend a howling few days at the Wallace Military Institute. There are love complications with the Major’s financée Pamela (Rita Johnson), who wants to keep him out of active service, and with her sister Lucy (Diana Lynn), a cold-eved little biologist, who wants to get him in. Ginger helps Lucy.

But the real fun in The Major and the Minor are Ginger’s relations with the lovelorn cadets. Each of them tries to kiss her by showing her “how they took Sedan,” then offering to show her how Paris fell. Cadet Wigton (Raymond Roe) takes Sedan with a fuzzily rapacious kiss, fails to take Paris. The other boys superimpose a line of their own on this basic strategy. Cadet Osborne (Frankie Thomas Jr.) turns out to be Masher Benchley’s boy. Like his old man, he uses the Park Avenue technique, tells her that “you and I could make beautiful music together.” Like father, he fails even to take Sedan. One chubby little cadet just leers forlornly, like a bleached Boyer.

Major Kirby, sweating painfully, tries explaining about the bees and flowers. By the time Fiancée Pamela expels Ginger from the school, she has learned a lot about boys, won the Major from Pamela.

An underlying coltishness has always been one of Ginger Rogers’ strongest assets; here, it is the whole show. Her scenes on the train are at once broad, delicate and unflaggingly funny. In the cadets, she has some of the stiffest comic competition of the year. Ginger’s real-life mother has a pleasant maternal moment playing her cinemama. Scenarists Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder seem to know all there is to know about the comedy inherent in the schoolboy mind. Billy Wilder, directing his first picture, puts it deftly across.