Cinema: The New Pictures, Nov. 14, 1949

Battleground (MGM) is a story about the Battle of the Bulge. Filmed with a sentimental, Mauldin-type humor and some standard war movie heroics, it concentrates on one squad of the 101st Airborne Division, which was enveloped near Bastogne by the surprise Nazi breakthrough of December 1944. The eight-day defense of Bastogne is gallantly manned by several of MGM’s regulars (Van Johnson, John Hodiak, George Murphy, Ricardo Montalban), who were toughened up before the filming by two weeks’ basic training, but who still look too full-faced for their battle-weary roles.

Though Scripter Robert Pirosh fought in the foxholes near Bastogne, his story is littered with humor, characters and incidents made familiar by every war story since What Price Glory. His soldiers, never silent, are always armed with dialogue that should keep movie audiences giggling and, in the acceptable Sergeant Flagg style, mordantly gripe and gibe at each other. That fixture of war movies, the rookie (Marshall Thompson) with the Mother’s Boy face and a frightened desire to please the grownups, turns up in the first scene; not long after, enters the friendly, lushly curved peasant girl (Denise Darcel). And so the show goes its well-worn way until the last survivors, about to be chopped to bits by the enemy, see the sky blossom with Allied planes.

Despite its gummy spots, e.g., a trite pep talk by Chaplain Leon Ames explaining to a battle-hardened gang of veterans why they are fighting, Battleground is the sternest studio-made war film since The Story of GI Joe. On the debit side, each soldier is given a bit of colorful routine that is tiresomely underlined every time the soldier is seen: Private Douglas Fowley loses or clicks his store-bought teeth; ex-Editor John Hodiak mourns over the fact that his wife in Sedalia knows more about the battle than he does. But Director William Wellman threads his way through these overworked signposts of character and makes each of the “Screaming Eagles” a rounded, tough human being. Ruthlessly demanding authentic gesture and movement from his actors, Wellman even gets it from that professional of boyish overstatement, Van Johnson.

MGM’s leading bid for Academy Award honors—and the first job at the studio to be signed by Producer Dore Schary—stacks up well against such recent combat films as Task Force and Command Decision; nonetheless such a wartime documentary as San Pietro makes it seem like a put-up job. Rarely catching the quick fury of infantry fighting, the camera shots are mostly the comfortable, carefully composed setups that are possible in a studio production, but in actual warfare would mean a quick death for the cameraman. Neatest trick: in most of the snowstorm scenes the snow sticks to everything but the G.I.s.

Everybody Does It (20th Century-Fox), suggested by a James Cain short story, is a dawdling, intermittently funny comedy with a high polish. Its he-man thesis: the musical world is a snake pit of sharpies, floozies, fairies, foolish dowagers, and is thus no place for a red-blooded male like Paul Douglas. The cute plot tells of the agony which Douglas, a professional housewrecker, goes through when his bird-voiced wife (Celeste Holm) decides to follow in Lily Pons’s footsteps. With the help of a famous diva (Linda Darnell), Douglas retaliates by putting his own glass-shattering baritone to work in grand opera.

Producer Nunnally Johnson is a facile, sometimes brilliant humorist whose movies (The Senator Was Indiscreet, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid) are sometimes not as screamingly funny as they should be. Paul Douglas is an able comedian, but he will have to have better parts if he is to be built into the popular favorite he gave promise of being in A Letter to Three Wives and It Happens Every Spring.

Edmund (The Razor’s Edge) Goulding was probably not the director who should have been assigned to run this particular enterprise. He gives the movie its glossy finish (Wagnerian-Modern decor, stylized acting), but he also sits on a comedy scene for too long, appears to lose his way, and gives it the diffuse quality of sleepwalking. Douglas’ big hangover scene in bed—a slow, ponderous thrashing around of a hippopotamus looking for a peanut—looks as much like imbecility as a tremendous morning-after. Instead of highlighting the farce, Everybody’s mannered, grandiloquent acting leads to a generally somnolent film fronted by some heavy facemaking.

That Forsyte Woman (MGM) has sets, lighting and costumes that are plushy enough to make a Ziegfeld production look like sordid realism. Flamboyantly Technicolored, it even brings in London’s drab fog in a variety of tints, from pale blue to raspberry. The all-over effect of elegance and hue leaves the viewer with a dull headache.

Among the Victorian bric-a-brac, Greer Garson, in deep moral distress, plays hide & seek with love. Her first marriage (to Errol Flynn) moves her into a clannish, property-minded family named Forsyte. After an unconvincing love affair (with Robert Young), she ends up with her usual movie mate, Walter Pidgeon, who represents the Paris branch of the Forsyte clan.

The movie seems to be trying to do for Victorian England what high-school operetta has done for the rose arbor. It is a flashy bore saved somewhat by a full-blown voluptuousness donated by Greer Garson and some interesting social comment by John Galsworthy, who wrote the original saga.