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The other is his antidote for getting over a bad spot in a picture. He just strides up & down interminably while everyone waits. The late Carole Lombard stood it as long as she could during the filming of Vigil in the Night, finally phoned her agent from her bed at 5 o'clock one morning: "I just thought what that pacing and thoughtful look of Stevens' mean." "What?" asked the sleepy agent. "Not a goddam thing," said she, and went back to sleep.
Joe Smith, American (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the man Hollywood forgot while it was busy glamorizing World War I doughboys. An aircraft factory worker, he is one of the 14 to 20 civilians it takes to keep a modern fighting man in the field. His story is just the kind of propaganda the U.S. would like to have Hollywood make more of. Adult, informative and entertaining, it klieg-lights the new warfare at a most important spot: the armament production line.
Joe Smith (Robert Young) is 30, born in Wisconsin of Norwegian and Austrian parents. He makes $1 an hour (plus overtime) at Atlas Aircraft Corp., where he is a mechanic. He has a wife (Marsha Hunt), whom he loves; a child (Darryl Hickman), whom he spoils, and an FHA-financed home.
Until war hits him, Joe is just another untested American. Selected by his employers to install the new Army bombsight in their aircraft, he is snatched by enemy agents who want a blueprint of the sight. He is tortured, escapes, and his abductors are finally captured.
Without poaching on melodrama, Director Richard Thorpe manages to add triumphant suspense to his mauled hero's removal from the torture hideout by having him, though blindfolded, scratch the door jamb in departing, count the steps going down to the car, recall the turns, a dip in the pavement, a stop-&-go signal, the sound of a calliope, etc. All these well-noted clues come home to roost when he goes over the ground a second time.
The picture (from a story by Paul Gallico) is a credit to all concerned— especially to Director Thorpe and Producer Jack Chertok, Scenarist Allen Rivkin, pretty Mother Hunt, and Mechanic Young, who plays his Ail-American role with likable, natural, easygoing familiarity. Not a high-powered movie, it is a first-rate die for the new propaganda models which Hollywood is readying for mass production.