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The picture's central character is the Army Air Force's Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. (Robert Taylor), who was assigned to spearhead the historic Operation Silverplate. The film shows Colonel Tibbets testing and perfecting the new 6-29 long-range bomber in 1943, assembling and training a group of Air Force experts at Wendover Field in the Utah desert during 1944, piloting the Enola Gay (named after his mother), which dropped the first atom bomb on Japan in August 1945.
When it hews to fact, Above and Beyond has documentary validity. And its final sequence, pieced out with newsreel shots of the Hiroshima bombing, has the impact of epochal drama. But unfortunately, Producers-Directors-Writers Norman Panama and Melvin Frank have combined their awesome A-bomb subject with a grade B Hollywood plot. Marital misunderstandings keep cropping up between Colonel Tibbets and his wife (Eleanor Parker) because of his dedication to his job and the secrecy attached to it.
The picture touches only briefly on the moral aspects of the atom bomb.
Colonel Tibbets remarks once, parenthetically, that although he does not approve of mass atomic destruction, it is necessary to speed the ending of the war. One of the few less somber scenes in the film (and one based on an actual incident) has Mrs. Tibbets-mistaking an atomic scientist at Wendover for a sanitary engineer and having him repair some plumbing.
My Cousin Rachel (20th Century-Fox) is a 19th century whodunit that poses a perplexing riddle: Is the fetching, half-English, half-Italian widow Rachel (Olivia de Havilland) a murderess who killed her former husband? And is she now slowly doing away with her lover (Richard Burton) by slipping laburnum seeds into his tea? Or is Rachel only misunderstood—a gracious, generous "woman of impulse ... of strong feeling" whose husband died of a hereditary brain tumor? This mystery is slickly served up with all the full flavorings of romance, tragedy, revenge, intrigue and suspense. Bells clang in the distance, the surf beats on the misty Cornish coast, shadows loom in moss-covered castles. Most of the characters are moody, tormented people who indulge in such eccentricities as ocean dips in the dead of night, and make such remarks as "I came to be troubled by strange and formless fears." Like Daphne (Rebecca} du Maurier's current novel, on which it is based, the picture provocatively leaves the question of Rachel's innocence or guilt up in the air. But there can be little question about the movie version's box-office outcome. Like the Du Maurier novel, it has all the well-mixed ingredients of a sure bestseller.