The New Pictures

The Bold and the Brave (RKO Radio) is a war picture as laconic and perceptive as a good reconnaissance report. It tells of a battle in a sergeant's soul, of the lives it cost, of victory lost by a kind of courage and won by a kind of cowardice.

The sergeant (Don Taylor) seems to be a good Joe at heart, but then nobody can quite reach his heart. In a brilliant piece of character-writing, Scriptwriter Robert Lewin explains his man. When the sergeant was a boy, his father died of drink; the boy's feelings, already numb with shame, were frozen fast with fright when his guardian, a religious fanatic, told him that his father had gone to the Devil, and that there, but for the grace of God, he would go too.

Now a grown man, the sergeant still mistakes the life of the flesh for the death of the soul. He carries his fanaticism as a scared child carries a candle in the dark, and so his whole world is filled with a black monster which he calls the Devil, because he cannot see that it is really his own shadow. Since it is wartime, the shadow falls readily on his German enemies, and he slaughters them with the righteous wrath of an avenging angel.

On this tortured soul, two buddies (Wendell Corey and Mickey Rooney) play what turns out to be a disastrously impractical joke. On a four-day pass, they bribe a pretty little Italian whore (Nicole Maurey) to teach "The Preacher" about the birds and the bees. She asks him to her room. He does not realize what she is suggesting. Like many people who suffer guilt in imagination, he is pathetically innocent in real life. She takes him on a picnic instead. He drinks buttermilk while she drinks vino, shyly confesses that she is the first girl he ever took out. And suddenly, with a luminous sweetness rarely seen on the screen, they are in love, and love transforms them. His sore soul heals like a wound in sunlight, and her shut face bursts open like a merry parasol.

It closes soon enough. The sergeant finds out about her past, and leaves her with a curse. He knows in secret that what he is leaving is life--but then is not life what he has always really feared? Is not death what he has always really wanted? In the allegory of the final battle, the sergeant cruelly discovers that a man who cannot live cannot die, that the evil men see in the world might turn to good if men would only see it in themselves, that only fear can cast out love.

These various powerful themes do not always quite gee into one another in the crowded climax, but The Bold and the Brave is nevertheless a successful film of an unusually serious kind. In his direction, Lewis R. Foster has managed to make ideas as well as characters come clear, and when the lines are especially good, his actors tactfully subordinate themselves to what they are saying. Don Taylor and Wendell Corey play neatly in tandem as the cowardly hero and the heroic coward, and France's Nicole Maurey does something rare in dramatic history. She makes a believable human being of the sentimental prostitute. But it is Mickey Rooney who brings off the best scene: a crap game so shatteringly funny that it almost breaks up the picture. And at the end, as he staggers across the battlefield in desperate pursuit of the money, of the future that blows away from him forever, the audience is confronted with an image that may almost suggest the mindless immensity of man's fate.

Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen; United Artists). As writer-producer-director, Robert Rossen spent not much less time (four years) and probably more money ($4,000,000) on the production of this picture than Alexander did on the entire conquest of the Persian Empire, and there can be no doubt that, in some ways, his effect is even more shattering than the martial Macedonian's. The picture presents two hours and 25 minutes of continuously colossal spectacle in CinemaScope, Technicolor and stereophonic sound. There are 6,000 people in the cast and 1,000 horses. Several regiments of the Spanish army were rented for the battle scenes, and a sizable slice of Spain was borrowed. Three towns were taken over for incidental scenes. Europe was ransacked for theatrical supplies: 1,800 suits of Greek and Persian armor, 450 swords, 200 bows, 3,000 arrows, 6,000 short spears and 400 long, 1,200 shields, 42 chariots, 600 other pieces of antique hardware. Dozens of himatia and chitons were run up by Spanish seamstresses from the ancient Greek models, and hundreds of wigs, beards and mustaches had to be found--along with such items as 50 scars and 36 plastic noses. The publicity department announced proudly that when the shooting stopped "there was not a single imitation precious stone [or] gold tassel left in Madrid."

The stuff of spectacle is indeed all here, and Director Rossen has marshaled it with care and passion against the stern Spanish landscape. His best scenes have the faithfulness and the feeling of fine color plates in a history book--King Philip's drunken dance among the corpses at Chaeronea, the hurling of the spear into Asia, the symbolic blow at the navel of a continent when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, the sordid grandeur of Darius' doom, the murder of Cleitus in a childish pet.'

But illustration is not cinema, and a chronicle is not a drama. In the final analysis, Rossen tells his story less through pictures than through words, and he tires the spectator's mind with facts but never reaches his heart with their meaning. The words, nevertheless, are written at a pitch of high declamation that movies rarely attain, and the players suit the action to the words. Fredric March as Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon, Claire Bloom as Barsine, Niall Mac-Ginnis as Parmenio play with the grace and generous gesture of figures on a Grecian frieze, and Richard Burton as Alexander can light the screen now and then with a true flash of the great conqueror's reflected glory.

Patterns (Harris-Myerberg; United Artists), based on television's hit play by Rod Serling, is a candid and unusually discerning peep into the executive suite of the big U.S. corporation. The hero (Van Heflin) is an unlicked cub of commerce, a young "production genius" from the Midwest, who is suddenly thrown among the wolves of Wall Street. The leader of the pack, a cold-eyed master of industries and men (Everett Sloane), sets him to work on industrial relations. Heflin's immediate superior, the executive vice president (Ed Begley), is a pleasure to work for--a warm, outgoing man in his 60s, with more of the human than the Midas touch. They are soon fast friends, and Heflin heartily takes up Begley's quarrel with the boss man.

One day Heflin realizes with horror that even as Begley is being barbered for the ax, a man is being groomed to succeed him, and that man is himself. Worst of all, the hero has to admit that he wants the job--even though it means that his friend's head must roll. The climax comes when Begley, driven too hard, dies of a heart attack. Heflin and Sloane, in a tremendous scene, stand toe to toe and slug it out on the central issue of the drama: Is business a good or an evil thing? Evil is as evil does, says Heflin, and feels that Sloane has just done legal murder in the name of the stockholders. Sloane does not deny it, but goes on to confess his creed: business, like oxygen, is a fact of nature. It does not matter whether it is good or evil. It only matters that man cannot live without it. Business, he declares, is bigger than any businessman. "It's no one's business. It belongs to those who can keep it growing. It belongs to whoever has the brains, the nerve and the skill to take it away from us."

The mystique of Mammon has seldom found such passionate dialectics, and Heflin cannot resist its persuasions. Sloane, after all, has only told him what he really wants to believe. So he takes the big job (at a massive increase in salary and stock participation), but only on condition that he be permitted to fight the boss every step of the way for what he believes to be right. But what precisely does he believe to be right? And when did the boss ever stop him from fighting for it? "It's easy to chuck something that you think is wrong," Heflin tells himself vaguely in conclusion, "but this way maybe there's a chance."

The solution is rich in irony, richer still in its humanity. The hero, when all is said and done, has accepted the pattern. Playwright Serling does not sneer at him, and he does not sneer at the pattern. Big Business is not the villain of Serling's piece. There is no villain. There is only the same big world, and another little man who gets lost in it.

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