The New Pictures, Feb. 26, 1945

Objective, Burma! (Warners) is a practically book-length (2 hr. 22 min.) tribute to the U.S. paratroops. At the rate Errol Flynn & Co. knock off the Japanese, it may make you wonder why there is any good reason for the war to outlast next weekend. On the other hand, you may be too excited to bother with such thoughts.

Some three dozen paratroopers, led by Major Flynn, are dropped in the jungle to find an enemy radar station whose destruction will aid the airborne reinvasion of Burma. They succeed almost too glibly, liquidating Japs so thoroughly that not one survives to shoot back, or even squirm. After blowing up the station, they get to a flight strip in plenty of time to be picked up by U.S. transports. But when a Jap force keeps the transports from landing, their anabasis begins. They are now faced with a march through some 150 miles of steep-slanted, many-rivered jungle, slithering full of the enemy. From here on, things are really—and realistically—tough.

This story is used not as an excuse for histrionic heroics but as a basis for a good deal of dogged, specific detail about men at war. While the paratroops struggle through the jungle, the camera peers ahead of them and on all sides, at silent spaces of water, at cryptic screens of leaves, and each of these inhuman shots is charged alike with menace and monotony. When the besieged survivors make a climactic last stand on a hilltop, and darkness swarms in with the enemy, the screen is so dark that the audience is almost as confused as the men are—and the sound track is silent, for once, long enough to suggest the actual suspense of the minutes before such an attack.

Such examples of plain commonsense and good storytelling may be credited in part to the script (by Ranald Mac Dougall and Lester Cole), with its careful attention to such matters as insect bites, the yells of jungle birds, the setting of a grenade trap, the use of plasma and salt and atabrine tablets. But still more credit goes to the veteran director, Raoul Walsh. Objective, Burma! gets pretty long, and you can seldom forget that its soldiers are really just actors; but within the limits possible to fictional war movies, it is about as good as they come.

The Thin Man Goes Home (M.G.M.) and Having Wonderful Crime (RKO-Radio) both proceed on the safe assumption that laughs and murders combined are usually better boxoffice than either commodity marketed separately.

Thin Man William Powell, an old and expert hand at this sort of thing, has done it four times before. This time he once more has the able help of his original partner, lynx-eyed Myrna Loy, back in films after four years’ absence. There is also, of course, the bottlebrushy terrier Asta, who must, unless like Hitler he is two other dogs, richly qualify by now for M.G.M.’s munificent old-age benefits. The fifth time around, the three of them still guarantee a pleasant excuse for putting off household repairs and serious reading.

Having Wonderful Crime, in keeping with its title, is broader and dizzier than the new Thin Man, rather less shrewd and professional, but on the whole just about as entertaining. Whereas Thin’s Nick & Nora Charles are a first-rate detective and a grade-A, sport-model wife, Crime’s three amateurs (Pat O’Brien, George Murphy and Carole Landis) are cheerful dopes. Once they find Magician George Zucco daggered in his trunk in a resort hotel, they hightail off after every red herring in sight. Nicest character: a daft old dowager who likes to write gigantic checks in disappearing ink.

Roughly Speaking (Warners) should not disappoint admirers of Louise Randall Pierson’s brisk, brash autobiography of a rampant housewife (TIME, June 28, 1943), and will probably amuse plenty of others. Dashing through some 40 years, it does comically for the U.S. middle class much of what A Tree Grows in Brooklyn does more seriously for the not-quite-working class.

Louise Randall (Rosalind Russell), a woman energetically eager to skate across the thin ice of feminine emancipation, was too much for her old-fashioned first husband (Donald Woods). When the “Recession” of 1921 lost him his job and got her one, he left her for another woman, telling her, on his way out: “If I died you’d just regard it as another way to develop your character.” Louise’s second husband, Harold Pierson (Jack Carson) was a happier match. Husband No. 1 had groaned, “Living with you and those kids was like living with Carrie Nation in a den of lions.” Pierson, a happy, irresponsible sort, took on Louise and her four children with cheerful unconcern.

Louise gave him ambition; he in turn gave her such good companionship that she lost at least the supercharge of her own careerism. Together they got the boys to Andover and Yale and Harvard, come what might; raised so many roses trying to lift a mortgage that they broke the New York market; financed the development of a pioneer monoplane which crashed along with the Stock Exchange; got through the Great Depression with a pleasant bit of comedy about peddling vacuum cleaners; began to recoup tidily in & about the New York World’s Fair; and invincibly began discussing their next move—back-to-the-land—after they saw their sons off to war. The theme of the film, as Harold Pierson states it, appears to be that this is a country where you don’t get shot for dreaming.

CURRENT & CHOICE

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (James Dunn, Peggy Ann Garner, Dorothy McGuire; TIME, Feb. 19).

Tonight and Every Night (Rita Hayworth, Lee Bowman; TIME, Feb. 12).

Hangover Square (Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, George Sanders; TIME, Feb. 12).

The Suspect (Charles Laughton, Ella Raines; TIME, Feb. 5).

Mr. Emmanuel (Felix Aylmer, Greta Gynt, Walter Rilla; TIME, Jan. 29).

Brought to Action (U.S. Navy; TIME, Jan. 29).

I’ll Be Seeing You (Joseph Cotten, Ginger Rogers, Shirley Temple; TIME, Jan. 22).

The Fighting Lady (U.S. Navy; TIME, Jan. 22).