Counter-Attack (Columbia) has its off moments, but they do not keep it from being an absorbing and notable picture. Its story: a Russian paratrooper (Paul Muni) and a Partisan girl (Marguerite Chapman), seeking vital data about the location of enemy troops, are trapped with eight German soldiers in the basement of a shelled factory. The two Russians are armed, and they have lantern light and candles enough to last perhaps a week. An initialed German revolver leads them to suspect that an officer, who would have the information they seek, is hiding in disguise among their prisoners. Using their peasant shrewdness and stubborn ness against German craft and arrogance, and conducting an increasingly terrible battle against sleep, they set to work to worm the officer out of the group and the information out of the officer.
In the course of the contest the paratrooper's savage cockiness causes him to blurt out a crucial Russian secret — that the counterattacking Russians will cross a river at an "impossible" point by means of a night-built, underwater bridge. (Of the building and the crossing there are some operatically magnificent shots.) In the long run, however, stubborn shrewd ness triumphs over crafty arrogance.
At several crucial points this essentially psychological melodrama becomes dubious through overtheatricality, but overall it is searching and persuasive well beyond the usual attempt of films. The picture is also a very considerable cinematic tour de force, comparable with Hitchcock's Life boat and in some ways even harder to do.
Plenty of good directors have wanted to bring off just this sort of dead-static drama, so daringly ascetic in its denial of all the screen is supposed to need most and do best. Few have tried it, and none has succeeded more shrewdly than Zoltan Korda. With last year's excellent Sahara, this film puts him among the country's top directors.
He owes a debt, however, to James Wong Howe's beautiful photography, to Scriptwriter John Howard Lawson (who also wrote Sahara), and to the eight Germans who, barring some excesses forced on them by the script, make up a supporting cast the like of which is dreamed of but seldom seen. In his fatter, more difficult role Paul Muni is as fine as they are so long as he takes it easy, but when he gets busy as an actor, his sincere, carefully paragraphed work seems unreal beside the Germans' snapshot authenticity.
The Corn Is Green (Warner) a very honest adaptation of Emlyn Williams' stage hit about the intrepid spinster who brought literacy to a Welsh coal town, has all sorts of well-intended ingredients, but as drama and as entertainment they come out lumpily, like somewhat heavy dumplings. There are several reasons. Besides the best one—that it wasn't really a very good play to begin with—the others are honorable minor defeats in an uphill battle. But they help explain why the movie, though it may well have a good run too, is less impressive than the play.
Bette Davis is in one way more to be respected than Ethel Barrymore, who originally created the role of the teacher. The role is not a glamorous one, and straightforward, careful Bette Davis gives it no bewilderment of glamor whatsoever.