Young & Evil

Reach for Glory. In one of the opening scenes, a band of British schoolboys, evacuees from the London blitz, stand panting on the rim of a precipice above a roiling sea. The victim of their chase, someone's pet cat, has just plunged to death on the rocks below--and perceptive viewers will know from their boyish faces that by the end of the film the cat-chasers will be demanding a real human victim.

All the boys are dazzled with the glory of war: "You don't think it will end before we're old enough to get in it, do you?" When the school starts up an army cadet corps, with uniforms and rifles, they are ecstatic. In his daydreams, young John Curlew shoots down a squadron of Nazis in his plane, cleans out a machine-gun nest with a single grenade, gets the Victoria Cross from Winston Churchill, and wins the adulation of the rest of the gang. In reality the other boys despise him for his friendship with Mark Stein, a Jewish refugee from Austria who is attending the school.

One day, spoiling for excitement, the boys challenge a rival gang to a fight. Stein becomes frightened and runs away; Lewis, the gang leader, decrees that he must be court-martialed and shot. Stein is shown the rifles and the live ammunition, and is blindfolded. Blank cartridges are loaded into the guns--or are they all blanks? This climactic tragedy brings on the only good scenes in the film--scenes in which the raw horror of their deed gives macabre substance to the performances of the adolescent cast. The point, as in another current film about British schoolboys, Lord of the Flies, is that the evil of war lies in mankind itself. Well taken, perhaps, but the little chaps must find it a bit thick that they should be so regularly singled out to prove it.

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