The Big Lift (20th Century-Fox) is an ambitious, two-hour film that pays the price of trying to do too much: document the Berlin airlift, take the measure of postwar Germany, sell democracy, and keep an audience entertained. At times the price seems heavy, but it is not too much to pay for a movie with enough originality, authenticity and skilled craftsmanship to set it apart from the production run of Hollywood.
To make The Big Lift, Writer-Director George (Miracle on 34th Street) Seaton spent nine months of preparation in Germany, three months of shooting on actual locations. He used only two Hollywood actors (Montgomery Clift and Paul Douglas), plus a handful of German professionals and a large supporting cast of U.S. Air Force officers & men whom he turned into surprisingly convincing actors portraying themselves.
At its best, the movie is an absorbing, human documentary of the airborne supply of a Soviet-blockaded Berlin.* It spins the hard facts smoothly into what is essentially a story of individual Americans and Germans. It catches the raillery and workaday heroism of the U.S. air crews, as well as some sharp vignettes, both grim and comic, of life in a broken, hungry city. Its camera work does full justice to the brooding ruins of Berlin and to graceful C-545 gliding dangerously down to a fog-shrouded Tempelhof field.
Seaton's story of two sergeants is also neatly designed to serve his other purposes, and in the main it serves them well: Clift is a good-hearted young Midwesterner who approaches the Germans with naive friendliness, and Douglas is a roughneck who loathes them with a bitterness stored up as a prisoner of war. Clift becomes disillusioned in a love affair with a calculating Berlin girl (Cornell Borchers) who hopes to use him as a passport to the U.S. Douglas is shamed by another German girl (Bruni Lobel) who turns out to be a better democrat than he is. Out of these experiences, and a string of minor incidents, the picture builds an oversimplified but well-argued U.S. point of view toward Germany—i.e., compassion with vigilance.
In attempting so much, The Big Lift becomes overlong and somewhat unwieldy. But where the picture really goes wrong, and badly, is in having Douglas spout repeated primer-level sales talks for democracy at his girl friend; the result is clumsy propaganda in a movie that would be excellent propaganda without it.
Clift and Douglas give unaffected performances that blend nicely with the acting of Director Seaton's remarkable nonprofessionals. Germany's O. E. Hasse shines as a cheerfully self-professed Soviet spy who feeds the Russians bogus airlift statistics because they will not believe the real ones in the newspapers. The film's most notable performer: Actress Cornell Borchers, who clearly qualifies as a "find." Alluring in a way that falls mercifully short of Hollywood's beauty-contest standards, she gives her role an unusual depth and subtlety.