“The Fighting Lady” is a good feature-length documentary about an American airplane carrier and its successful career in the South Pacific, and next to “With the Marines at Tarawa” it is the most chilling, matter-of-fact account of this war that has been shown in American movies. The best part of the film—which was otherwise shot by six navy photographers directed by Commander Edward J. Steichen—is the record of bombing attacks on Marcus, Kwajalein, Guam and Truk and of the Japanese fleet as caught by automatic cameras installed in the bombers. This kind of film, which is affected by every movement of the plane and journalistically records every bullet, evidence of flak and bomb hit, not only gives a violent sensation of dive bombing but records the destruction of a bombing raid as no other means has done so far. The editors wisely refrained from breaking into these records with shots of action inside of planes. Probably no other picture has given the audience a more realistic experience of the crashing force of a plane in combat.
The picture has been edited to include a maximum number of hair-raising incidents, and a number of events—like an exciting refueling of the carrier during a storm and a nerve-wracking fire-fighting job on a burning American plane—have been chopped too close. The only completely shown action is the strangest one: a logy enemy search plane hopelessly trying to evade a swarm of American fighters, and as it goes up in flames, the musical score, with typical Hollywood thoroughness, unnecessarily underlines its defeat with a spot of Japanese music. The destruction of American planes and fliers is almost totally cut out of the film, and even more noticeable deficiencies are the superficial, unimaginative shooting of shipboard life and the non-stop, non-cinematic commentary. This sounds like the heroic stories printed on boxes of Wheaties and is spoken on one grating note by Robert Taylor.
“On Approval” stays within the featherweight, vapid confines of a seventeen-year-old drawing-room farce about Victorians, and manages by amiability and a talented light touch to make its people and their half-assed lives quite lovable. It is the kind of play that is given to rearranging four uninteresting people in marriage for no other purpose than the kind of wit Abbott and Costello might pass up. But Clive Brook (who also directed it), Beatrice Lillie and Googie Withers make out all right with it. They realize how corny their material is and grab every chance offered to kid it, and they are relaxed enough and talented enough quite magically to make the people they are playing human. The film doesn’t have the slightest look of modern movie design, which is a good thing. It is thoroughly secure in its kidding, indifferent as to whether or not it is killing its audience—which it isn’t—and shows an awareness of the possibilities for achieving humor by a precocious use of the medium. The original play is too weak to stick to as closely as Mr. Brook’s movie does, but faint as it is, “On Approval” is more like the work of human beings than you usually get today in films.
Besides the event indicated in the title, “Sunday Dinner for a Soldier” shows the cute existence and habits of a poor, orphaned family living on a Florida house boat, and contains about everything that is found in books like “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” The problems have to do with scraping enough money together for food and clothes, or whether the girl should marry the rich boy and break up the family, and they get ironed out every minute on the minute by an interminable series of handouts, “miracles” and good deeds. The humor, which is a major part of every event, has to do with a clothesline’s breaking and with six chickens turning up for the Sunday dinner when it didn’t look as if any would. The family group is composed of cliché characters for the good ragamuffin family and range from the ventriloquist’s-dummy-faced youngest son up through bearded “Grandfeathers.” The acting is terrifying, and I felt every action and idea was interpreted so that I was not only shown the fact but told whether I should feel just happy about it or blissfully happy. The movie ruins two or three very good ideas, including the main one of a soldier being the guest of civilians, another having to do with whether “Grandfeathers” will kill the daughter’s pet chicken (completely muffed), and another about a moonlight incident when the daughter dances dreamily in an abandoned half-built seaside resort. This movie seems to me as unsuccessful as “Experiment Perilous,” “The Unseen” and “Music for Millions,” the last of which provides me with the chance to say that I don’t think the child star, Margaret O’Brien, is as good as I once or twice said she was.
February 12, 1945