The New Pictures

The Beginning or the End (M-G-M), the first full-length movie to grapple with the atom bomb, was given its title, inadvertently, by Harry Truman. When the picture was proposed, the President (as well as MGM's pressagent can remember) remarked: "Make it a good movie. . . . This is either the beginning or the end." The M-G-M boys undoubtedly did their best, under great difficulties; but, also undoubtedly, they didn't make a very good movie.

Their difficulties, indeed, are more interesting than the finished product. Both Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer wanted to make the picture. When it was agreed that Metro would make it, the troubles had only started. First of all, there were big problems of security. And it is obviously impossible to make a free-swinging, forceful picture if every foot of it has to satisfy the official and personal tastes of numerous politicians, brasshats and scientists. Casting was difficult, too. Eleanor Roosevelt was uneasy about any actor's portraying her late husband.* In the first version, it developed that Actor Roman Bohnen's bearing (as Harry Truman) was not quite "military" enough, so the Truman scenes were reshot with Actor Art Baker.

Someone in Washington also objected to a scene in which Truman first learns that the bomb is feasible and immediately decides to delete Hiroshima. (The scene now includes mention of sleepless White House nights.) M-G-M had to soothe some people who invaded territory still more remote from atomic security. A comic scene, in which Robert Walker (playing a major) makes a pass at a girl, was killed because the Army regarded it as detrimental to the dignity of a major's rank. Still another casualty was the film's only sure-fire chuckle--which had been placed, with fantastic bad taste, en route to Hiroshima. The laugh: a flyer asks, "Is it true that if you fool around with this stuff long enough, you don't like girls any more?" Says Robert Walker, "I hadn't noticed it."

The picture will probably do no great harm unless it discourages the making of better pictures on the same subject. But it will do no particular good either. Far from straining at the seams of security, it tells the average citizen little he doesn't already know about atomic fission. Of the peculiar terror and agony of the bomb in human terms, it tells incomparably less in two hours than certain newsreel shots of Hiroshima's survivors told in as many minutes. The treatment of the moral problems exacerbated by the bomb is once-over-lightly. Problems of atomic control (Army v. civilian, U.S. v. international) are shunned like the plague.

Even as entertainment, the picture seldom rises above cheery imbecility. The fearful light at Alamagordo and the bombing of Hiroshima are well contrived; but the fine opportunities for suspense--e.g., the trial run in the atomic pile under Stagg Field--are largely bungled. And most of the film's many impersonators look as sheepish as rejects from a waxworks. This is all a great pity, for nobody can question the enormous importance of the subject, or the sincerity of this effort. The moviemakers could easily use their marvelous medium to present important issues if they could only learn to 1) regard audiences as capable of facing facts and of worrying about problems, even problems which may prove unsolvable, and 2) stop treating cinemagoers as if they were spoiled or not-quite-bright children.

The Beginning or the End hopefully addresses itself to those who will find it, 500 years hence, in a time capsule. By that time it may be regarded as a rather foolish "document"--in case anyone at all is around to open up the capsule.

Angel and the Badman (Republic) is a pleasantly unconventional picture. John Wayne, whose first production it is, has dared to make a genteel western. What is more remarkable, he has gotten away with it. Sample: the Wild West barroom is so decorous it is all but suave. When the blonde entertainer sings (she is requested to, not bawled at), her voice does not rattle the bottles behind the bar. For moviegoers, this is a delightful new experience.

The Angel (Gail Russell) is as pretty a Quaker maiden as ever peered out of a poke bonnet. The Badman (Producer-Star Wayne) is the quickest-triggered man in the Territory (Tombstone, Ariz. & environs). They get to know each other when Mr. Wayne is perforated during a lawless scrap and is nursed back to health by Miss Russell's God-fearing family. By the time Wayne is well enough to tackle his enemy (Bruce Cabot) again, he is trying to do things both his way and the girl's. Since Mr. Cabot and henchmen have not yet adopted a policy of turning the other cheek, this makes for plot difficulties which are ultimately settled happily for the right people.

Movie ruffians are often brought to rectitude through the good offices of an innocent girl, a still more innocent child, or even livestock. As entertainment, the process is seldom either plausible or pleasing. But this movie brings it off. Despite its quietist theme, it contains its fair share of action, played with verve and skill against magnificent landscapes. Its unconventionally gentle stretches are even more engaging. The Quakers and their principles are presented, not as a mock-pious, cynical story angle, but with leisurely good humor and affectionate respect. Thus, John Wayne's uneasy digestion of the idea of nonresistance, and Gail Russell's portrayal of the recklessness possible only to the truly simple, become amusing and touching.

The film will probably convert few gunsters to the Society of Friends, and still fewer Friends to shooting-iron diplomacy. But in a season when horse operas are going stridently sexy, it is nice to see the great open spaces filled with something a little more edifying than heaving, half-bared bosoms.

*Son James, by remarking that those who made and played the Franklin Roosevelt scenes "obviously loved" his father, gave what appeared to be an unofficial green light for a screen biography of the late President.

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