The New Pictures

With the Marines at Tarawa (U.S. M.C.; edited by Warner Bros.; distributed by Universal) is war in the least expurgated form most U.S. cinemaddicts are likely to see. It has long been a question how much battle experience should be communicated to civilians. With the Marines at Tarawa should settle the question once for all. Some things have been left out (in battle the camera cannot be everywhere). And there is no shot of any American being wounded or killed. Nevertheless, the picture's 19 minutes of unflagging pity, terror and intense action make a film whose power no U.S. documentary has matched.

Cross-Texture of Violence. There is the endlessly cautious, catlike approach that a few marines make, across the open sand, to a blasted revetment which may still hold Japanese life, American death. There is the attempt on the part of a few others, as careful and painful as the probing of a complex wound, to climb a bunker and clean out its far side with rifles, flamethrowers, grenades. There is the weird, exquisite variety of individual expressions of skill and fear, which are the cross-texture of the violence of combat. Smoke, ruined palms, a boundless sense of death choke the screen. Men quickly fire into blindness, take quick cover, each moving jerkily with a quality of loneliness in the midst of action with which no loneliness of peace is comparable.

And there are touches, tender beyond the reach of invention. A boy who has withdrawn from the fight stands by a tree, exhausted, pinching the bridge of his nose. A young man holds gauze to his shot mouth and retires from the battle with precisely the hunched, half-stumbling gait of an athlete taken out of a game. There are two moments of greatness: the slow, tentative wading ashore of the relief troops on the fourth day (no camera recorded the slaughter of 300 to 400 on the second); the faces of the marines as they watch the flag rise to the peak of the pole they have won for it.

A Grimace for History. With the help of the Marine Corps, Warner Bros, has given this film fine reticence of sound effect and commentary. The very rawness of the color helps to give a rawer reality to some of the most real things ever fixed by a camera. But after all its fierceness With the Marines at Tarawa ends quietly, with one of the most powerful shots it records. The marines are trooping back from battle. They march toward the camera. One young fellow on the sidelines is smiling, almost with jubilation. There are no other smiles. One gaunt man, his face drawn with sleeplessness and a sense of death, glances up. His eyes reveal both his lack of essential hostility and his profound, decent resentment of the camera's intrusion. Just as he leaves the picture he makes a face, as a father might make a face at a child. In his eyes, in his grimace, he looks into the eyes of every civilian and whatever face that civilian is capable of wearing in reply. And in the eyes of the camera, with that salute, he meets the eyes of history.

See Here, Private Hargrove (M.G.M.) is war training expurgated by comedy. The picture dubs the title of 1942's bestselling, cubbish comedy of barracks life onto a swatch of slightly whimsical photographed cartoons. Typical cartoon: a soldier, agonizingly wriggling forward under barbed wire and live ammunition, exclaims: "My, this is exciting, isn't it?"

Private Marion Hargrove (Robert Walker) is typical of the half-grown, brash, good-natured boys whom the vast drafts of World War II have passed between the Army's shaping rollers. How to standardize such a kid into a soldier so disturbs Private Hargrove's captain that after one look at him the officer thinks of transferring to the Navy. In the long run Hargrove and his equally unmilitary comrades learn their trade. But the film devotes most of its time to the comic aspects of their training (mostly polishing garbage cans) and their vestigial private life.

Private Hargrove's particular pals are a slick con man, Private Mulvehill (Keenan Wynn), his bucktoothed, leering sidekick, Private Esty (George Offerman Jr.), and a solemn, proletarian, Private Burk (Bill Phillips). Private Burk tries to explain to Private Hargrove the puzzled sources of his patriotism, but Mulvehill and Esty simply gyp Hargrove right & left. As co-executives of a mythical Date Bureau, they sell him an evening with a girl (Donna Reed) who never heard of their scheme. They also form the Marion Hargrove Beneficial Association to raise funds for his New York furlough. The catch: he signs over to them the proceeds of his literary future. Later Mulvehill wangles good safe desk jobs for himself and Hargrove. But as their unit embarks for war, their sense of war's comradeship gets the better of them, and they plead their way back into the artillery.

Funniest shot: a monologue by Hargrove's girl's paunchy father (Robert Benchley), who buzzes away about his experiences in World War I while baffled Private Hargrove tries to get in a word.

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