In the static atmosphere of Hollywood film production, the appearance of Screen Plays Corporation, a peppery little band of young aesthetes as hard and profit-minded as Du Pont, should cause more upheaval than any incident since the Santa Barbara earthquake. Hollywood has never experienced anything as brainy and volatile as this ant-hill organization that has managed not only to shake the foundations of the elephant studios but to leave them standing still in their own race for the fattest loot. The curious aspect of this new company is that it blends the creative artist's imagination with the Sammy Glick talent for peeling cash off of nothing. Its aim seems to be to kill two birds by turning out a five-cent "Gone with the Wind" and introducing techniques and ideas that are a few levels above the I.Q. of the average moviegoer, according to the superstitions prevailing in the industry. But Screen Plays is not the Prince on the White Charger, for underneath, as is seen in its new movie, "Home of the Brave," beats the heart of a huckster, a heart that has grown its tissues in the theatrical atmosphere of middle-brow and sentimental Broadway.
The irrelevantly titled "Home of the Brave" is a war film which starts with some good shattering shots depicting the brutality and destruction of battle but suddenly changes into idle, muddy psychiatric double-talk and a tepid display of the Negro problem. A Negro G.I. named Moss (James Edwards) returns from a dangerous mission traumatized and half-paralyzed; in this weakened condition he is put under the care of a noisy psychiatrist (Jeff Corey) with the face of a manic hawk and a bellicose, exasperated attitude that should complete the ruin of Moss but instead puts him on his feet in a couple of days and gives him a lot of difficult thoughts to play around with for the rest of his life. After all this psychotherapy Moss is told he suffers from discrimination chiefly because he is too sensitive. This gets a big laugh, particularly from Negroes in the audience, who doubtless think of all the jobs they didn't get because of over-sensitivity.
The script writer (Carl Foreman) plants some bold dashes of prejudice but never grounds the movie in the street-level type of incident that would illustrate the Negro situation in all its bulging ugliness. The bite has been taken out of the problem by constructing the Negro G.I. as a thoroughly passive creature who is ceaselessly tormented by his enemy, continually soothed by his friends, who plays a meek guinea pig for the psychiatrist but scarcely makes an impression on anyone else; he is so suavely mute that this pioneering movie about anti-Negro prejudice unreels itself oblivious of the fact that the whole film does not contain a Negro (Moss is actually the man who wasn't there). James Edwards plays him as a bland, unmarked, self-possessed, and graceful character, very little different from the other players, although he is supposed to have been a long- standing victim of their conscious and unconscious prejudice. The character in the original play by Arthur Laurents was a Jew, and in making the change the producers simply lost sight of the fact that the Negro has suffered from a different, more violent kind of prejudice here; Moss appears to have neither offered nor suffered any kind of violence.
"Home of the Brave" is infused with a sophisticated technique that turns an essentially thin and artificial script into a clattering, virile movie with deeply affecting moments. The sophistication appears everywhere: instead of seeing the Jap sniper fall, as in any other war movie, al that you see in this movie is broccoli-like jungle, accompanied by a slithering sound and a mild clonk to inform you that the sniper is done for. The script is so basically theatrical that it has to be acted almost entirely from seated or reclining positions, but the director works more variations on those two positions than can be found in a Turkish Bath. The actors talk as though they were trying to drill the words into one another's skulls; this savage portentousness not only forces your interest but is alarming in that the soldiers are usually surrounded by Japs and every word can obviously be heard in Tokyo. Actors are never balanced within the picture frame; often a head is half cut by the top of the screen or, for no reason, some secondary figure will walk straight through a shot, knocking out your view of the principal figures, but giving an effect of careless spontaneity to a scene that is actually no more active than the inside of a can of sardines. This energetic technique has several limitations: the repetition of close eye-level shots practically puts the actors in your lap, but after a few reels I would have liked a long shot of all of them on top of a mountain; the camera men are so enamored of shadows in outdoor scenes that the actors often seem afflicted by leprosy. Dimitri Tiomkin's background music only comes on in crises, adding extra heartthrobs where the action is as swollen with emotion as a Faulkner river.
Well played and punchy, "Home of the Brave" is not quite clever or ingenious enough to conceal its profit-minded, inept treatment of important issues.
Home of the Brave, which had private screenings here this week, comes closer to the true story of the Negro-white problem as developed in this country than anything yet made in Hollywood.
It is simultaneously a stark drama of war and a powerfully presented smash at prejudice against the American Negro. Such films as "Crossfire" and "Gentleman's Agreement," both award winners, carried real messages to the American public about anti-Semitism but "Home of the Brave" far surpasses them both in boldness of script and action.
This production, adapted from Arthur Laurents' Broadway hit and produced by Stanley Kramer, boasts several firsts:
It is the first Hollywood film to probe anti-Negro bitterness in this country.
It is the first major film production to go from start to release in less than two months.
It is the first film in Hollywood to be planed, written, cast and produced in secrecy.
Kramer, in Hollywood, revealed that no one knew of the production because he swore 600 persons to secrecy, a Herculean feat in a town as gossip-minded as Hollywood. This was done, he explained, in order "to make an important entertainment feature in its completed form without the usual attendant publicity, so that we would be free of pressures, suggestions and advice of those not connected with its making. And we felt it unnecessary to exploit fact that we were making a picture of complete reality."
The "secret" story of Home of the Brave" began several years ago when Producer Kramer first became interested in the Laurents play which had anti-Semitism as its theme. At the time-- before other films like "Crossfire" and "Gentleman's Agreement"--he had found it impossible to get production financing for a story with this content.
Some months ago Kramer revived the idea and in a moment of inspiration changed the central character from a Jew to a Negro and started to prepare a script in cooperation with Screenwriter Carl Foreman and Director Mark Robson.
"Actually," Kramer stated, "the theme of 'Home of the Brave' remained unchanged, for the basic conflict was the same."
As for the film itself, the action as a whole is excellent with few if any shallow spots.
GI Peter Moss, played by James Edwards, is the Negro star in the film. Known as "Mossy" to his Army mates, he is first seen as a battle casualty, paralyzed from the waist down, remembering nothing and suffering from shock of his experiences during an intelligence mission on a small South Pacific island. His condition is aggravated by his deep-rooted sense of persecution.
The truth of this comes to the doctor, Captain Bitterger (Jeff Corey) who sees at the root of the young Negro soldier's incapacity a long history of prejudice and hate felt by Mossy both as a person and as a symbol. Under the care of the doctor, Mossy begins to relive the hateful incidents of his past and the film from this point is a series of flashbacks which start him from six years old when he witnessed the humiliation of his parents simply because they were Negroes through the shocking events that took place on the Jap-held island from which he had been removed following his paralysis, by his companions.