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As Murphy's comrade in arms, Cartoonist Bill Mauldin plays a young soldier who takes everything with deadly seriousness—from a fistfight in which not a blow is struck to the shattering moment when he and Murphy overhear a general describe their regiment as worthless, just before giving the boys a pep talk and ordering them to attack. With no more continuity or plot than the battle it describes, Red Badge is mostly memorable for its tight vignettes of human confusion. It ends on an appropriately ironic note: the jubilant regiment, having driven back the Confederates, learns that its hard fighting had little effect on the course of the action; the main part of the battle had been fought and won by other troops on another field beyond the mountains.
No Highway in the Sky (20th Century-Fox) puts James Stewart into the familiar role of a lovably naive eccentric who wages a one-man rebellion against bull-headed officialdom. Director Henry Koster freshens this foolproof formula with suspense and humor, casts Marlene Dietrich in no less foolproof a role as a glamorous movie queen, and surrounds his stars with a talented cast recruited in Britain, where the movie was filmed from a novel by Nevil Shute.
As Theodore Honey, an obscure research engineer in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Stewart plugs patiently away at an experiment to prove his calculations that the tail assembly of the Reindeer, a new transatlantic plane, will snap off from metal fatigue after 1,400 flying hours. In a trance of pure science, he is unperturbed by the fact that Reindeers already in passenger service will reach the estimated breaking point long before his laboratory proof can be ready.
Without knowing quite what to make of the absent-minded researcher, his new boss (Jack Hawkins) orders the experiment speeded up, dispatches him to Labrador to look into the crash of one of the new planes. Widower Stewart says goodbye to his gravely precocious daughter (Janette Scott) and shambles aboard a Reindeer. The trip starts brightly enough; a pretty stewardess (Glynis Johns) pampers him, and Movie Star Dietrich dozes just across the aisle. Then he learns that the plane is just past its crucial point of strain.
From that moment on, audiences should instinctively reach for their safety belts while Hero Stewart desperately tries to convince a skeptical pilot and a pompous official hierarchy that what started as a problem in pure science has become an urgent matter of life & death.
Flying Leathernecks (RKO Radio] is the latest in the long line of films celebrating the exploits of U.S. arms in World War II. Except for the fact that its heroes are U.S. Marine flyers whose combat feats look unusually spectacular in Technicolor, the new movie differs from most of its predecessors no more than one can of C rations from another.