A LOWER-BUDGETED, gimcracked renewal of the gangster films, called “Roger Touhy, Gangster,” is more than mildly underdone on a number of its sides. The characterization of the gang is in the one-sentence notation department, and the notations are as indifferently conventional as the invariable fact about cowboy films that the hero’s buddy is always comical and decrepit. One member of the gang (Victor McLaglen) has a passion for learning, another (Frank Jenks) for “a girl named Daisy” and a third (Horace McMahon) for alcohol. The one exception in the general void of characterization is an instance of well marked sadism when Touhy (Preston Foster) beats up a henchman for drinking. Documentation about the gang’s career seems to have been out of the research department’s reach, except for an unaccountably well detailed enactment of their prison break. The acting, aside from Preston Foster’s ever reliable surliness, proceeds by fits and starts and as though the performances had been given for different directors and different pictures. Along with some very nostalgic reminders of the old gangster films, such as transportation in careening sedans and communication by snarls, the film has two mild virtues. The first is that though it has very little of anyone’s life, none of it is as glorified as the lives of super love, adventure and bravery that Cagney, Muni and Robinson spent in earlier, and better, gangster films. The second is that the director cut in some good, actual film shot at Stateville Prison in Joliet, which is grim and chilling enough to put the fear of prison into any lawbreaker.
“Two Girls and a Sailor” is a sweet-toothed bargain of about 18 vaudeville acts, none of which is very good or very bad but is stuffed for the occasion with cutenesses, to go with a story about two sisters who are in love with the same millionaire sailor. The sisters, Gloria DeHaven and June Allyson, do a lot of grown-up movie things like dancing in night clubs, chasing Latin lovers and holding private servicemen’s canteens in their apartment after working hours, which would be about five in the morning, looking all the time as if they should either be home or with Gus Edwards’ Kiddie Revue. The people around them, who impersonate sailors, grandfathers and orchestra leaders, are necessarily made to look like kindly fathers or kid brothers. One average sailor, chosen at random, would produce the same effect in this picture as one of these sailors would on a battleship. The quality is a curious one that its producer—Joe Pasternak—gets by having teen-age girls play grown-up roles as if they were playing house, which allows him to hit the cute, wholesome side of sweetness. There is also his ability to interlock vaudeville and story in a nice way, to make them both more humanly palatable than they are in a lot of other musicals, and to turn people like orchestra leaders into actors.
The latest Signal Corps film, “Attack,” does a good, important job of showing the technique of invasion as it progressed from the first moment it was decided to obtain a landing place on the western tip of New Britain Island, to a time when the two objectives, Arawe and Port Gloucester, had been captured and American forces were pushing further inland. It is a couple of reels longer than either “Tarawa” or “Memphis Belle,” less intense, and has a more polite, manicured look. “Attack” shows the war better than you will find it shown in films of pure entertainment and an amphibious operation better than you will find it in any of the newsreel accounts that have been shown so far of the landings in France. It pictures the thousand and one operations involved in such invasions; there are some grim shots of the destroyer Bronson’s survivors being rescued, and some others just as grim when a jungle rainstorm swamped the landing craft. All along there is a good commentary delivered by a good Bogart-like voice.
July 3, 1944