The New Pictures

The Young Lions (20th Century-Fox). "And the sword shall devour thy young lions," wrote the prophet Nahum. His words, affixed in epigraph to Irwin Shaw's bestseller of 1948, seemed no more than intellectual makeweight in what proved to be a light package. But the film version of the novel, as conceived and produced by the late Al Lichtman (TIME, March 3), strikes deeper into human substance and rises more often to the epic height of its adage and its argument. Epic is plainly what Moviemaker Lichtman hoped to achieve--a sort of Europead elaborated out of the decisive events and determining attitudes of World War II. He missed the mark, but with the assistance of Director Edward Dmytryk and Scriptwriter Edward Anhalt. he has produced a broad and swiftly flowing film which carries on its narrative stream two performances--by Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift --of unusually deep draft.

Actually, the narrative, is divided into two streams. One rises in Germany, one in the U.S., and both run separately through the screenplay until they converge in the fatal conclusion. Brando, his hair bleached for the occasion, plays a sensitive German lieutenant who hates killing, but justifies it as the only way to bring lasting peace to Europe. He resists the attempts of his superior officer (Maximilian Schell) to make him "a creative soldier"; resists the military dictum that "when you become a soldier you contract for killing in all its forms"; resists the friend who tells him that despite all the corpses "nothing really changes"; resists the Frenchwoman (Liliane Montevecchi) who pleads with him to desert because "there never was anything for you to fight for"; resists until one day, in flight before the American advance, he begs for food at a concentration camp, and sees at last that, in effect if not in intention, he is no better than the brute who runs the gas chamber. Both destroy human life for no reason except that they are told to; both are brothers under the swastika.

Brando's American antithesis, played by Actor Clift, is a shy young New York Jew. A simpler animal altogether than the German boy. he fights for survival and for his unit, asks no questions and gets no answers. Brave, natural, extraverted, he probably exemplifies what was best in the U.S. fighting man of World War II just as Brando speaks for what was best in the German soldier. As a matter of fact, the script is rather too strongly inclined to see the best in people and events. The war clouds are dark indeed, but somehow they usually turn out to have a silver lining. And toward the end the whole film goes gargling noisily down the vulgar drain of propaganda.

It is a surprisingly inept last reel, all the more surprising because the rest of the script is intelligent: the dialogue is unusually literate, and the scenes are discreetly placed, like watchtowers, so that the moviegoer can command in a glance great distances of narrative that he might otherwise have had to travel at a footpace. As it is, the dizzyingly intricate tale takes 2 hr. 47 min. to tell, but hardly a minute of the time is wasted, and at least five minutes are devoted to a vignette of war in the desert that deserves to be studied as a classic. The moviemakers have also done a textbook job of cutting the film and intercutting the plots, and Dmytryk has enhanced his story by the sensitive way in which the light intensities blend and flow from scene to scene.

It is Brando and Clift. of course, who brandish the lightnings. Clift does a wonderfully funny, touching job of suggesting the sort of man, simple and clear as a bell, who rings true when he takes a beating; but at times he overdoes the job and rambles off in a fugue of mannerisms. Brando, on the other hand, underplays to the point where in many a scene only a telepathist could hope to tell what he is thinking; but in the long run he imparts to the audience an urgent and moving sense that there is a soul somewhere inside the lieutenant's uniform.

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