The New Pictures

Attack!--'The Invasion of New Britain

(U.S. Army Signal Corps; RKO-Radio). The subject: war. The purpose: to make war as real as possible to people who will never otherwise experience it. The result is no more entertaining than war is. But from first to last it is impossible not to stare with fascination at this film.

In one hour Attack manages to give a remarkably clear picture of the whole task of invading bejungled beaches. Not even the great Desert Victory (TIME, April 12, 1943) has made so articulate the tremendous collaboration of men and machines which is required to put fighters in position and to keep them there. No film except Tarawa (TIME, March 20) has given keener images of what jungle fighting is like. Attack's images of vast messiness and spine-cracking effort as men move tanks, guns and ammunition from the beach into the jungle's boggy fantasia are even more impressive than the breathtaking shots made from low-flying strafers, or the magnificence of certain moments when the morning mist merges ships, men, surf, jungle into half-glimpsed symbols of men and nature.

Most of the action shots showing the attack on New Britain were made the day after last Christmas. In the U.S. that was Christmas day, the audience is told, while it watches young fighting men hunch miserably in the drenching rain. Some of the commentary in Attack is mawkishly "American," but most of it is as direct and unaffected as most of the shots. There are clearly some fine anonymous camera and sound men in the Signal Corps. The clanging iron gangways, the rattle of unloading, the grunt and nutter of motors struggling in the mud add much to 'Attack's power. And at the film's end the almost inaudible mutter of burial prayers gives a simple validity to the closing shot (an open grave) and to the line: "One day of American living--bought, and paid for."

The Story of Dr. Wassell (Paramount). One night in 1942 Producer-Director Cecil Blount De Mille listened to Franklin Roosevelt tell an episode from the war in the Far East.

It was about Dr. Corydon Wassell (rhymes with throstle). Dr. Wassell was a plain Arkansas country doctor who went as a medical missionary to China, later joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. He was put in charge of wounded men from the shattered cruisers Marblehead and Houston, which got to Java just ahead of the Japs. Dr. Wassell stowed his casualties in an inland hospital.

When 60,000 Japanese invaded Java, Dr. Wassell was ordered to evacuate all his wounded who could walk. The stretcher cases were to be left to the Japanese. Disobeying the order, Dr. Wassell brought all of his men back to the coast. When a ship captain refused to take the stretcher cases aboard, Dr. Wassell stayed behind with them. The only able-bodied man among them, Dr. Wassell kept the nine wounded men alive, somehow got eight of them through the jungle to the coast and aboard the overcrowded Dutch steamer Janssens, the last United Nations ship to leave Java. The Janssens made Australia after being bombed and strafed. Dr. Wassell expected to be court-martialed, instead was given the Navy Cross.

When Franklin Roosevelt finished his broadcast, Cecil B. De Mille, who knows a good movie story when he hears one, promptly registered the title with the Hays Office, beating four other studios to the draw.

Dr. Wassell is a big, bright, brassy, specious show in which Gary Cooper (as Dr. Wassell) goes through some highly Technicolored, highly ordinary motions, and every nurse in the picture (Laraine Day, Signe Hasso, Carol Thurston) is a shinier pippin than the one before. Typical characterization: Dr. Cooper imitating the grunt of a razorback hog and murmuring, "Good gravy!" Typical set: a remote Chinese village as cute as Christmas and twice as cheerful. Typical nurse: a little native number named Three Martini (Carol Thurston), who keeps her nurse's dress unbuttoned to expose a prettily filled Javanese brassiere. Typical pathos: a blinded Alabamian (named Alabam) who outhears everybody else and who, whenever there is dangerous confusion, cries: "Kin anybody see anything?" Typical use of music: a studio orchestra plays The Star-Spangled Banner, pianissimo, as the stranded stretcher cases watch the ship that refused to take them withdraw into a calendar sunset.

The Story of Dr. Wassell misfires not because it is unfaithful to fact--a picture much less faithful to fact could have been much more true. And Cecil B. De Mille has great respect for fact. But he is a born romancer, a highly experienced showman, and old-fashioned in both fields. His talents, as well as his limitations, conspire to turn a saga of simple heroism into a typical Hollywood entertainment feature. But they also hamper this picture as simple entertainment.

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