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Sands of Iwo Jima (Republic) is a war picture that bristles and booms with enough clips from official combat films to give its audience a realistic touch of battle fatigue. The rest of it is just plain fatiguing; the plot has no more freshness or emotional tug than a military manual, and it is peopled by a movie-hardened cast of characters who have served too many hitches on Hollywood's back-lot battlefields.

This time John Wayne is the hardbitten U.S. Marine sergeant who runs his squad by the book. John Agar flashes his dimples petulantly as the softheaded malcontent who turns out to be manful after all. Also present or accounted for: the dumb rookie, the natural-born comedian from Joisey City, the blowhard who lets his buddies down, the Greek who calls everybody "Sport," the kid too young to die (who dies), and the squarest-jawed bit players that Republic could find.

Armed with overage dialogue ("Do you believe in love at first sight?"), they dawdle on leave in rear-area bases. Agar meets and marries a vacuous blonde, played by Adele Mara as if she were struggling to learn how to talk. The script even dredges up a golden-hearted harlot (Julie Bishop) and throws her at Wayne's head. But the tough sergeant never lays a finger on her; when he learns that her tot is in the next room, he opens a box of Pablum. (Says she, impressed: "You know about babies!")

When the marines go into action, at Tarawa and Two Jima, they behave more like marines. While taking pains to reconstruct big scenes of the island battles, Republic has leaned heavily on incomparable wartime film to catch the terrible fury of the Pacific fighting. Unfortunately, by intercutting shots of Wayne & company--studio-lighted in uniforms that don't match those of the real invaders--Director Allan Dwan gets a patchwork that suggests a series of trailers intruding on some bang-up newsreel footage.

Iwo Jima's greatest asset is leathery, lithe John Wayne. His relaxed acting of a sleepy-eyed, two-fisted he-man (6 ft. 4 in.) has made him a pillar of credibility in many an unlikely blood & thunder epic. Broken in like a good saddle, in 150 pictures over 20 years, his coarse-grained appeal has finally won 42-year-old Actor Wayne a place (according to Showmen's Trade Review) second only to Bob Hope among the U.S. box office's favorite male stars.

Born Marion Michael Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, Wayne broke into the movies as a prop man, graduated to cowboy actor when Director John Ford took a shine to him. Through most of the '30s, he made quickie westerns so fast that he "practically had to sleep on a horse." In 1939 Director Ford came to the rescue with a leading role in Stagecoach. After that, Wayne's career went ahead at full gallop.

Today, with his appearance in a picture reckoned as a guarantee of a $2,500,000 gross, Wayne is spreading himself so thin that he is behind schedule at Republic, RKO and Warner--each of which holds him under contract. One day last spring no fewer than nine first-run Los Angeles cine-mansions were showing John Wayne pictures. The payoff is handsome: Wayne averages more than $5,000 a week, gets 10% of the gross on films he makes for grateful little Republic.

Wayne is jealous enough of his reputation to insist on having top directors wherever possible. "I don't want to imply that I'm a great actor," he says. "But I'm an investment, and I gotta protect it. You can't put out caviar under a salmon label." Fortnight ago, to make the label unmistakable, Republic opened Iwo Jima with full premiere panoply in Hollywood's Carthay Circle, plugged the picture and its star for Academy awards.

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