The New Pictures

Reach for the Sky. (J. Arthur Rank). "Damn!" thought R.A.F. Cadet Douglas Bader (rhymes with ah'd her) as he lay in the smoking wreckage of his tiny biplane and inspected his shattered leg. "I won't be able to play rugger on Saturday." Cadet Bader was right. By Saturday both his legs were off. "Sssh!" he heard a nurse say. "There's a boy dying in there." The sick man stiffened. "Dying! We'll see," he thought grimly, and began to fight for his life.

In fact, 21-year-old Cadet Bader fought with a ferocious courage that amazed his doctors, who had given him up for dead. After that he astounded the artificial-leg industry, which assured him (as he hurried off to take his best girl dancing) that no man with two artificial legs could so much as walk without a cane. He then horrified the R.A.F.'s brass, which nervously denied him a peacetime flying commission. And ultimately, during the Battle of Britain, he painfully distressed the German Luftwaffe. For the few to whom so many owed so much owed much indeed to Wing Commander Douglas Bader, the dogfighting fool who hammered out, in the heat of battle, many of the fighter tactics that prevented a German invasion of England.

Reach for the Sky, the most popular picture (gross: over $1,500,000) shown in England during 1956, is based on Paul Brickhill's lively biography (TIME, Aug. 2, 1954), and has Kenneth More--the bachelor in Genevieve--in the title role. Actor More, who is probably the world's ablest portrayer of damn-the-torpedoes extraversion, gives a cracking good imitation of a fighting nature that thrived in adversity. Yet the show, more or less, is More--or less. The script suffers from a kind of paraplegia of the narrative instinct, and the fly-stuff never gets off the ground. Even so, the man somehow comes through, and what a man.

The Devil's General (Gyula Trebitsch; Stebbins). "In a pinch," says the German proverb, "the devil eats flies." But how did he ever manage, in the puny form of Adolf Hitler, to gobble up all those meaty burghers of the German middle class? How could so many "good Germans" have been so bad? This picture, based on a play by Carl (The Blue Angel) Zuckmayer and magnificently directed by Helmut Kaeutner (The Captain of Koepenick), gives an answer that apparently satisfies the Germans. Made in Hamburg in 1955, the movie has been running for 18 months in West Germany and has grossed 4,000,000 DM. But the U.S. moviegoer, while acknowledging the film's superlative skill and horror as a biopsy of the Nazi cancer, may have some reservations about how it reads the riddle of the German character.

The film's hero, General Harras (Curt Juergens), is admittedly modeled after the late Ernst Udet, the German ace of World War I who was a Luftwaffe general in World War II. Harras hates the Nazis, but not as much as he loves his air force, and he knows that if he gives up the one he will have to give up the other. So he goes along, year after year, swallowing his disgust ("After each sitting [i.e., conference] I feel like pulling the chain") and guzzling champagne--the picture of a man too weak to put the public good before his private passions, the picture of a Fascist Faust. In the end, of course, the devil demands the reckoning, and Harras goes gallantly to hell.

The gallantry, in fact, is the false note. Zuckmayer and Kaeutner have mocked up a marvelous illusion of life in the Nazi ruling circles at the turning point of the war. The scene, as they paint it, is a seething roach nest of military puritans, rat-eyed party fanatics and servile chimney barons, of endless work, nonstop parties, public arrogance, private Angst, Germanic sentiment and rotting will, of spies, lies and a dirty, interminable fight for personal power. And through the scene but somehow above it, like let's-pretend Valkyries, wanders a tribe of strangely ambivalent German women: violent when they are wicked, passive when they are good.

The character of Harras (played with full vibrato by Actor Juergens, a sort of John Wayne with Heidelberg trimmings) is a highly romantic one--rather like a combination of Siegfried and Graf Bobby*--and his fiery death is stirringly Wagnerian. But from U.S. moviegoers the hero will probably get no better than pity, and the picture itself, apart from the high praise it deserves as a piece of cinematic craftsmanship, will inevitably inspire a more negative emotion. As the hero himself expresses it: "I can't eat as much as I want to vomit."

*The Austrian figure of fun, a degenerate young aristocrat who always says stupid things that are somehow not so stupid after all. Example: when the tide began to turn against the Nazis, Graf Bobby went into a map store one day and asked for a globe of Germany.

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