The New Pictures, Aug. 13, 1945

The Fleet That Came to Stay (U.S. Navy-Paramount) is a shattering and dreadful record of the work of Japan’s suicide flyers. The U.S. fleet which stood off Okinawa not only came to stay, it had to stay. The 6,000 to 7,000 of Japan’s youngest men who flew Japan’s oldest planes were quite as inextricably committed; they were locked into the mortal vortex of the divine tempest—Kamikaze.

Judging by the few who were brought down and captured, most of them knew just enough about flying to keep their crates straight and level, and had never before experienced flak. But it was with irreducible pride that they wore the red sash which dedicated each to death as a certainty and to the utmost destruction he might achieve by diving his explosive-packed plane into U.S. battlecraft.

Of these flyers, 4,232 were shot down. Many reached no target. But some did. This film gives abundant images of both attack and defense—and both are at once unimaginably brave and abject.

Ships are struck—the Nevada, the Bunker Hill—and you see the massive helplessness of power and number before one midge to whom life has ceased to have meaning. A midge dives and misses, by a matter of yards, of feet, and sprouts its fierce little explosion of utterly useless death. In his last seconds of life what must be in the mind of the Kamikaze flyer who succeeds or of the flyer who fails? Flak, a great storm of it, for what seems like minutes in a continuous shot, searches after a retreating plane, and at last connects. The plane comes down streaming flame. Another, that seems unhit, comes abruptly to pieces in midair. A heavy suicide plane with one wing gone, hurtles over & over with sickly oafishness as it falls. Another swoops in a long, low slant, just clears the heads of the crew, chops into the water like a spent dart: U.S. sailors, with the bemused fixity of men narrowly escaped from death, crane their necks like children to watch its explosion.

Even when they fly still intact, rattletrap, ungainly, frail, murderous, the suicide planes are lonely and individual as faces, macabre as hearses, cryptic as death itself. And against the “men who want to die” roars up the desperate skill and clamor of the “men who fight to live.” Both the intrepidity of reason, and the intrepidity of whatever the Japanese use in its place, are caught in The Fleet That Came to Stay in a relationship beyond all logic. It is not a pleasant film. It is an immemorially primitive nightmare in extremely modern dress; a dance of death.

Jealousy (Republic) dramatizes neurosis. The neurosis belongs to a refugee writer (Nils Asther). He is somewhat paranoiac, so his wife Janet (Jane Randolph) has to support him by driving a taxi. Her husband becomes jealous of one of her fares, a Dr. Brent (John Loder), and the doctor’s handsome colleague, Monica (Karen Morley). About the time Cinemactor Asther stops threatening to commit suicide or murder, he is murdered himself. Who kills him is something of a mystery, but even those who are not much mystified will find other things to interest them in the film.

Often implausible and clumsy, Jealousy includes some good melodrama and Intelligent cinema. The refugee is well conceived and extremely well played by Nils Asther. Even better is his kindly fellow refugee (Hugo Haas). The domestic quarrels and crises are venomous and painful, well beyond Hollywood’s normal handling of such unpleasantness. Karen Morley, who has not made a picture in years, is still one of the most attractive and individual cinemactresses.

The picture’s decor is not just the usual glossy set of illustrations, it is lively and eager in movie terms. Hollywood’s streets, outskirts, diners and small bars, with which the picture is liberally sprinkled, give it the special vitality of actual time and place. And the film is capable of poetry as well as naturalism. (Sample: a subtle slowing of motion to heighten the sinister mood of a scene in which the neurotic writer, in order to torture his wife, tosses poisoned food to some flying gulls.)

A good many able people, including composer Hanns Eisler, contribute to the picture, but overall credit goes to Gustav Machaty, who produced and directed it and co-authored the script. He is best known to U.S. audiences as the man who made Hedy Lamarr’s notorious (but artistic) indiscretion, Ecstasy.