Task Force (Warner) is an ambitious, full-dress review of the ups & downs of U.S. naval aviation. Thanks to the practiced teamwork of Producer Jerry Wald and Writer-Director Delmer Daves (Destination Tokyo, Dark Passage), it is a thoroughly businesslike job. By playing up the facts and playing down the fiction, they have produced a film which at its best carries the conviction of a documentary and the impact of history in the making.
The history lesson is modestly pegged on the career of a young Navy pilot (Gary Cooper) who gets his start in 1921 aboard the U.S.S. Langley and retires at the end of World War II as a rear admiral. Meanwhile, along with a salty senior officer (admirably played by Walter Brennan), he has fought a stubborn battle for carrier-launched aircraft—in outmoded planes, in Annapolis classrooms and in a series of Washington lobbies. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Navy's Cooper happens to be stationed aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise as it is making for Pearl Harbor.
For the magnificent climactic sequences of fighting at Midway and Okinawa, Moviemakers Wald and Daves combed through some 2½ million feet of U.S. Navy combat film. The results—in both black & white and Technicolor—are breathtaking. Some of the shots, which moviegoers will remember from wartime newsreels—of planes toppling across a flight deck like gasoline torches and of Kamikazes dissolving into smoke and matchwood 100 yards from the carrier's bridge—have the effect of recurring nightmares. Equally effective, except for the muttering background music, are the crowded shots of a carrier's communications room, the intricate, knotted nerve center of the battle.
Hollywood can claim no credit for the shattering magnificence of the combat scenes in Task Force. But for the sharp-eyed selection, and the patient cutting and pasting which brings history roaring back into vivid, living focus, it can claim a knockout.
Task Force has a double box-office virtue: its release is timed 1) to cash in on U.S. naval aviation's well-publicized wrangling with the Air Force and 2) to get an early start in a new Hollywood cycle of World War II films. (Coming up in the near future: Battleground, Sands of Iwo Jima, Twelve O'Clock High, Three Came Home.)
Timing (not always so good) has been only one of the minor specialties of moonfaced, meteor-paced Jerry Wald in his eight years as the workhorse producer of the Warner lot. Last week, while the average producer managed to look busy on his year's quota of one or two pictures, Mass-Producer Jerry Wald had five more films finished, and three about ready to start shooting. It was not an unusual week for Hollywood's busiest moviemaker. Last year he turned out nine pictures, including the laureled Johnny Belinda, and got enough quality into the quantity to win himself the prized Irving Thalberg statuette for high-grade production.