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Mercifully, the script omits the standard love interest. As if only for the record, it briefly establishes Ladd's romantic prowess in a token dalliance with Stewart's blonde mistress (well played by Jan Sterling). The real leading lady is a nun (Phyllis Calvert) who needs his protection as the only witness to the murder. Inspector Ladd, who usually measures his fellow man with cynical suspicion, soon finds himself softening under the example of her unselfish sense of duty. At this late date, moviegoers should not be surprised to learn that Nun Calvert wears lipstick and coaches baseball.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
(MGM) is a Technicolored pastiche of symbolism, the supernatural and old romantic claptrap. Filmed picturesquely in Spain by Coproducer-Scripter-Director Albert Lewin, the movie begins by pairing a modem Pandora (Ava Gardner) with the legendary Dutchman himself (James Mason). From there it goes on to bullfighting, reincarnation, suicide, auto-racing, murder, archaeology, an insistent verse by Omar Khayyam and a couple of interacting love triangles.
As Pandora, Actress Gardner is a cruelly flighty American girl who drives men to distraction at a Spanish Mediterranean resort. She is also the very image of the Dutch wife for whose murder, four centuries earlier, Mason is doomed to sail the seas until he can find a woman willing to die for him. Omar Khayyam's moving finger, worked to the bone by Scripter Lewin, brings the two together during the brief interval (once every seven years) in which Mason's curse permits him to make port.
Though she is already hotly pursued by the greatest matador in all Spain and engaged to the world's fastest auto-racer, Ava feels drawn to the mysterious stranger. At length, while an ominous soundtrack narrator keeps describing what is all too visible on the screen, and the camera catches some revealing glimpses of Ava swimming out to his anchored ship, the picture's catchall plots bring selfish Ava to the point where she will gladly give her life for love of him. But Mason loves her too much to let her do it. Another flick of Omar's finger solves this high-flown problem. Only then, having writ for 123 long minutes, does the moving finger move mercifully on.
Go for Broke! (MGM) adds another laurel to one of the most decorated U.S. combat units of World War II,* the Nisei of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Treated at first with taunts and suspicion, rankled by the knowledge that their families were herded into resettlement camps, the Nisei proved themselves both loyal Americans and superb fighting men.
Go for Broke! (from the regimental motto, a piece of Hawaiian dice-shooting slang for "Shoot the works!") follows the outfit from a U.S. training camp into the heat of the Italian and French campaigns. It tells the story largely in terms of a Texas-proud lieutenant (Van Johnson) whose Nisei men gradually overcome his prejudice against them. At the climax, the 442nd's rescue of a trapped battalion of the 36th (Texas) Infantry Division in France's Vosges Mountains, even Johnson's diehard, Jap-hating buddy (Don Haggerty) takes the Nisei to his bosom.