Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 15, 1943

Youth In Crisis (March of Time) and Children of Mars (RKO-Radio) are two unusually vivid, powerful, short films about wartime juvenile delinquency.* Both films cover the same ground, but they are so different in approach and emphasis that they supplement each other.

Youth in Crisis deals more with the cause and extent of the problem than with the cure. The film shows the lack of emotional security in homes robbed of their parents by war plants and rocked by the immeasurable restiveness created by war itself. Babies wake screaming in siren-haunted blackouts. Boys just below draft age go on alcohol, marijuana and obscene-book jags, shrug off the discipline of parents who earn no more than they do. Mothers find it next to impossible to advise teen-age daughters who, erotically, are almost as experienced as Mother.

Children of Mars, a less terrifying and to that extent a less true job, nevertheless performs three important services. By concentrating on a white-collar family, the film makes clear that wartime delinquency far exceeds the chronic economic slum-sickness of peacetime. Even among children of the well-to-do the present delinquency rate is high. Presented in both films, typical solutions are:

> Semiskilled hospital training for girls.

> A Y.W.C.A. “teenage canteen” (for young girls and for servicemen under 20).

> Work-play in laboratories and manual-training shops.

Guadalcanal Diary (20th Century-Fox) is a resourceful adaptation of Correspondent Richard Tregaskis’ best-selling war book, and a straightforward, exciting picture. The Marines are first shown singing, loafing, ribbing each other aboard ship, responding quietly to the ground swell of their anticipation and their ignorance, taking very lightly (in a fine, honest scene) the reading-aloud of the rather pompous order which first tells them where they are going. These shipboard scenes and those in which the Marines land, find no enemy, and only slowly begin to learn about Jap snipers, are among the most real in the picture.

Tokyo, 3,380½ Miles Away. The characters are skillful percolations off men mentioned in Tregaskis’ book—a clownish, kindly-hearted Brooklyn taxi driver (William Bendix), a smooth, hard sergeant (Lloyd Nolan), an ex-All-America chaplain (Preston Foster), a trigger-happy, brave child called Chicken (Richard Jaeckel). These men and others as simply characterized are put through 1) quiet days & nights of increasing apprehension; 2) the raid on a nearby village (Matanikau), from which only three returned (only one, in the film); 3) cleaning out the Japanese with grenades, gasoline and TNT; 4) the ferocious Japanese naval shelling of Oct. 15, 1942, during which William Bendix improvises a prayer; 5) the relief by the Army, which ends the film on a grim exchange between a battle-bittered Marine and an unblooded Army boy, and the closeup of a signTokyo, 3,380½ miles.

Honesty and Fuzzy Focus. In the course of this film, fear, combat shock, trickery and brutality on both sides are shown more frankly, with less cinematic salad dressing, than in any U.S. film to date. Yet Guadalcanal Diary must be counted as much a failure as a success.

With a few exceptions (notably Richard Jaeckel), a film which is supposed to reflect historic life & death is handicapped by too familiar faces.* The picture never makes clear how desperately expendable the Marines felt on Guadalcanal. Nearly all the really deep dread and panic which developed there, and which so enhanced and complicated the bravery, is played either as simple fear or comedy. There is hardly a moment when kill-or-be-killed becomes an electrocuting fact rather than an energetic re-enactment at second hand. U.S. audiences, though they are bound to respect and like Guadalcanal Diary, want and need more than that, if they are to live in the same world with the men who fought on Guadalcanal.

* Origin of Youth in Crisis: MOT’s distributors (20th Century-Fox), needled by distressed exhibitors, asked whether anything might be done on the screen to discourage juvenile vandalism in movie theaters Of some 150 social agencies consulted, only three doubted the advisability of making the film.

* Richard Jaeckel, 17-year-old son of the late New York furrier, will become no familiar cinemug: he has turned down a screen contract in favor of the armed forces.