The New Pictures

Wake Island (Paramount) is the first attempt to make a document of U.S. troops in action in World War II. As a straight Hollywood show, the result is better-than-average. As an effort to fill civilians with the image and meaning of a terrible and magnificent human event, it is as good, and as far short of good enough, as can be expected of producers who underrate their subject, their audience, their moment in history, and the tremendous powers of the medium they work with.

For the strictly military action, Scriptors W. R. Burnett and Frank Butler, and Director John Farrow stuck to the Wake Island log and made their record "as accurate and factual as possible." But the participants and their conduct at ease and in combat are fictional. The people who are supposed to give flesh & blood to Wake Island--a tough major (Brian Donlevy), a tough lieutenant (Macdonald Carey), a tough contractor (Albert Dekker), a tough team of comic privates (Robert Preston & William Bendix)--are sincerely invented and acted, but hopelessly unreal in so stern a context. Not even Brian Donlevy, who does his job as soberly as if it were a military assignment, can quite convince anyone that he is anything but the too-familiar, patriotic young actor, doing his best not to look like one.

The combat scenes are better, because battling machines and anonymous faces under stress carry an impact no self-conscious actor can give. When enemy planes swirl like gulls to machine-gun a helpless, bailed-out pilot, or when the screen is hammered full of recoiling guns, pressure dials, the disciplined metal of the air, and spasmodic twisted faces, Wake Island becomes a moving effort to record an action on a heroic scale.

But such moments are few, brief as flash bulbs, and continually let down by carelessness, conventionality, lack of imagination, lack of insight into faces, minds, motions. Some characteristic letdowns:

> Even the celluloid film is wrong. The silky panchromatic light which properly drenches a grade-A romance softens the strongest images of courage or death into a comfortable fiction.

> Men who are bombed or shot down in droves do not lie unanimously still. Some must show, by sound or motion, that to die or be wounded is not easy.

> After a fleet has made its impressively slow approach, models of it should not be knocked to pieces in an obvious tank of water.

The purpose of a film like Wake Island is to convince, startle, move and involve an audience to the highest possible degree. Toward that end, faces, bodies, machines, rhythms, darkness, light, silence & sound must build up a tension which is a plausible parallel to human fact. Wake Island is a cinematic defeat because it builds up this tension for brief moments, then relaxes.

Somewhere I'll Find You (M.G.M.) is a farewell piece for Clark Gable, now a corporal in the Army Air Forces at Miami Beach. If he lacked stomach for the job (he has made no other picture since the death of his wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash last spring), he tries manfully to conceal the fact, does more than his share in turning out a typical Gable show, loud, expert, witty, rough.

Jonny Davis (Clark Gable) and his kid brother Kirk (Robert Sterling) are ace war correspondents. Both are in love with bright-topped Paula Lane (Lana Turner), also an ace war correspondent. The trio's assignments take them from Manhattan to French Indo-China and Manila. But most of the time they are busier with their luckless love affair. Their story is mainly a set of cues for the sort of hard-boiled mating-dance at which Mr. Gable is an amiable virtuoso. In Manhattan Jonny makes love to Paula, then jilts her. In Indo-China Paula makes love to Jonny. In Manila, Paula treats Cinemactor Gable to some ear-fondling that would paralyze censors less innocent than those in the Hays Office, lures him once more into a psychological betrayal of Brother Kirk. Then the action shifts to Bataan. A swift fadeout, filled with the keening crescendo of an enemy shell, ambiguously ends the lovers' fitful fever as Jonny finishes dictating a bangwhang spate of headline copy to his newspaper.

Lana Turner is a superbly tough and toothsome foil for Mr. Gable's masterful routines. She can so tilt her chin that, in any posture, she suggests that she is looking up from a pillow. Clark Gable has had better parts before. But in his closing speech on Bataan, he develops real heat and resonance that suggest a rather moving transition from the celluloid fictions which, for years, he has made likable, into facts which, for the duration, will be his obscure, more serious business.

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