The New Pictures

The Fighting Lady (U.S. Navy-20th Century-Fox) is the fiercely beautiful and thrilling color record of an aircraft carrier's career from her launching through her first half-dozen engagements.* It was shot during the past couple of years by a crew of six enlisted men, coached by famed photographer Captain Edward Steichen, and directed by Lieut. Commander Dwight Long. Their combined mileage was cut to its present 7,500 feet and 60 minutes by Fox's Louis de Rochemont, first producer of the MARCH OF TIME, whose first Hollywood film this is. John Stuart Martin, formerly of TIME, wrote the script; Lieut. (j.g.) Robert Taylor, formerly of M.G.M., narrated it. More responsible, in a sense, than any one of these men for the film's magnificence were the automatic cameras which peered down the barrels of the guns of fighters and bombers to record the picture's overwhelming shots of combat and flaming death.

The story of this flattop begins with green young men, many of them unbelievably boyish, endlessly rehearsing their deck and air routines, or loafing in the sunlight as their floating town lounges through the improbable colors of the Gulf Stream and edges her way through the Panama Canal. While they loaf, they wonder. Their destination is still as dead a blank to them as their experience of combat. Then, well out in the Pacific, in some rough, wonderful shots, they meet a tanker and refuel, and know at least that their job is to be long and businesslike.

In the course of their long voyage out, you get some sense of knowing the whole 3,000-odd personnel, from the cobbler and barber and tailor to the princely-looking royally treated pilots.

At length, some 7,000 miles out of Panama, they approach and learn their target--the small, elegant triangle of Marcus Island. The night before their first experience of combat--a night crowded with taciturn faces, with letters home, with prayers and last Communions, with the subdued, systematic turmoil of spotting the deck, with athletes' breakfasts served by artificial light, and finally with just waiting--is one of the most moving sequences in the film.

It is followed by something even more powerful--the take-off of the planes against an extravagant dawn which one might only smile at on a calendar. That in turn meets more than its match in the pictures which follow--the first of those many gunbarrel shots of combat in color which, in their effortless achievement at once of superhuman force and grandeur and of jewel-like delicacy, might well make this film the envy of good poets and painters for the rest of time. Later on, over Truk and Kwajalein and the Marianas, these shots--plus some hair-raising ones of crash-landings on the carrier deck--heap one astonishment so thickly upon another that the eye and mind can hardly keep pace. For violent air action and for pure visual magnificence, The Fighting Lady is not likely ever to be beaten.

I'll Be Seeing You (Selznick-United Artists) is Hollywood's first attempt to focus on the predicament of a shell-shocked soldier, trying to find his way back to normal life. Good and moving as it sometimes is, it leaves much to be said which, for the sake of the many neuropsychiatric casualties who are already returning from the war, badly needs saying to American civilians. The picture's crucial weakness: it confronts its fumbling, humiliated, pitiful soldier Zack (Joseph Cotten) with a girl (Ginger Rogers) who, instead of being reasonably average, is also a decidedly special case. Zack is on Christmas furlough from an Army psychiatric hospital; Mary is on Christmas furlough from a penitentiary.

Such artificiality, falling far short of universal human interest, also leads to painfully irrelevant storytelling: the girl spends a large part of the picture deceiving Zack, first for her own good, later for his. And in the course of pampering this sort of overspecialized pathos, the far more pathetic and important story which the picture pretends to tell gets pretty thoroughly tear-dimmed.

Yet the picture is very far from being a total loss. Joseph Cotten's muted, excruciating performance is the best single guarantee of that; some moments of deep warmth and sympathy from Miss Rogers are also valuable. And the rest of the cast and David O. Selznick, Producer Dore Schary and Director William Dieterle have done a good many unpretentiously remarkable things.

At the home of the girl's aunt (Spring Byington) there is some touching domestic business (by Miss Byington, Shirley Temple and the accomplished Tom Tully)--memorably a Christmas supper at which everybody sings O Come, All Ye Faithful. There are also moments of franker pain and shock than most films dare to hand an audience without Boris Karloff to reassure them it is all in fun--a scene with a screwily bellicose veteran of World War I (Chill Wills--see cut), a horrible fracas between Zack and a dog, a still grimmer scene in which Zack, alone in his Y.M.C.A. room, all but drowns in a maelstrom of the unforgettable noises of combat.

When Zack and his girl stroll through subdued, snowless winter country, the landscape is photographed with an appreciation of the power and subtlety of weather that most U.S. moviemakers seem to lack. When Zack invites his new friends to a New Year's Eve party at the Y, the crowd there is precisely as it should be. So are the decorations and so--a typical Selznick touch--is the sailor, off at the side, solemnly working himself into a lather on the parallel bars. (Other Selznick touches: a stuffy senator asking Zack how the boys overseas are thinking politically and getting a quite unpleasant answer; a woman scolding her little boy--his name: Franklin.)

There are dozens of such indications that Selznick knows and cares more about getting American life into good moving pictures than any other man with his combined power and talent.

* The carrier is no one actual ship; it is typical of carriers of the Essex class (27,000 tons). Much of the action was shot on one particular carrier, which the Navy does not wish to identify.

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