“With the Marines at Tarawa” (shot by Marine Corps photographers and assembled by Warner Brothers) is the most descriptive account of American men in combat that has been issued this war. If any film has got into the heart of battle, it is this account of one of the more dreadful engagements in the Pacific, in which some 3,000 Marines were killed or injured in taking a 22-mile-long island. None of them is shown being killed or injured; there is only the one glimpse which has been reproduced in newsreels and magazines of the dead floating in the water along the shoreline. But the nature of the fighting is indicated throughout the film’s 19 minutes—in the moment where some Marines warily move forward to finish off a blasted Japanese pillbox and in every halt, doubt, erratic movement that marks their walk into possible enemy bullets; or in the unending way a machine-gun crew pours bullets straight ahead, and in the way one of the crew turns as though he had been doing this for hours and was due to go on doing it, and lights a cigarette; or in the look of the men who leave the island or those walking in across that deadly, exposed expanse of water from ship to beach. Besides the intensity of its image of men facing death at every instant, it gets over an equally meaningful one of the special state to which modern fighting has progressed. You never see the enemy because he is hidden behind incredible concrete defenses, but you realize his deadliness by the way the Marines inch their way up to these defenses until they can blast out the occupants with flame-throwers, grenades and mortars. There is a constant haze of smoke over the island from gunpowder, and by the fourth day Tarawa looks as if it had been shaved.
The producer of fictional war films, as well as everyone else, would do well to watch this short, where nothing is ever as direct, orderly and bald as it is in fiction films, and everything is full of strange idiosyncrasies and unpredictable movements that make every scene tremendously significant. He would learn that grenade-throwing isn’t something as flowery as a wind-up by Buck Newsome, that the nature of a battle might be captured wholly by a glimpse of a face that has been through it, that there is something queerer and much more moving in the walk of a really injured person than in, say, the way Thomas Mitchell walks in “Bataan.” “With the Marines at Tarawa” is a film I strongly advise everyone to see.
The continuity of “Tunisian Victory,” which is a joint effort by the government film units of Great Britain (under Hugh Stewart) and the United States (under Frank Capra) to record the latter part of the North African campaign as well as “Desert Victory” did the earlier part, has been chopped practically to confetti. The film seems to have been worked by several thousand cooks, each of whom decided to throw in another commentator, some more maps and some business he found exciting in another documentary. Or else the original material was spotty, or the attempt to show all of the parts of a complicated campaign in clear, scholarly manner squeezed everything down to evaporation. Whatever the reason, “Tunisian Victory” will prove, even at its level of interest, more exciting than some future schoolbook accounts of the campaign, and maybe as accurate. It has undoubtedly established a record for the number of different commentators used per second and for the number of maps used per inch.
“Chip off the Old Block” amiably intertwines several stock movie situations solely as an excuse to show the complete working vocabulary of Donald O’Connor, who was seen as a smaller boy several years ago in “Sing You Sinners,” and now, after a vaudeville career and more movies, is a candidate for Mickey Rooney’s role of most precocious film juvenile. O’Connor has some of the looks and vitality of a cricket, dresses like orchestra leaders or crooners, and tries everything—this includes the dancing of Fred Astaire and Don Hartman, the mugging of Mickey Rooney and some of Ben Blue’s goon-like comedy. He is best without any of these influences, having a soft, unsullied and friendly quality plus an extremely cagey, vaudevillian’s talent, which permits him to make use of almost any kind of material and to give it a certain charm and originality. This ability to brush off a stock gag without waving it at you will surprise you: for instance he even gets by with that business of eating the girl’s powder puff instead of the marshmallow. I’d like to see him in straight roles. The picture has much of his lightness and grace when he is around doing straight non-singing, non-dancing comedy. There are a number of rather famous older people interspersed in the doings, among whom Arthur Treacher and J. Edward Bromberg enjoy themselves most with material that might kill them otherwise.
April 3, 1944