The Beachcomber (J. Arthur Rank; United Artists). Asked who discovered the South Sea Islands, a schoolboy once replied: "Somerset Maugham." He was right, of course. Captain Cook found some geographical points, but he missed the emotional one that Sadie Thompson and Ginger Ted, the supreme remittance man in all literature, have supplied to millions. Ted is back again in this second screen version of The Beachcomber. This time Actor Robert Newton sees, as Charles Laughton in the 1939 version failed to, the low, colonial swank of the fellow, and plays it for the snickers it deserves.
The instant Ted comes boulevarding into view, through a window, the moviegoer has a sudden reflex to check his wallet. Hair plastered down, three days' growth of beard, sour-looking tropic-whites, smile like an overpolished apple and nasty little eye like a worm in it: Newton is the picture of a man who has made a gin fizzle of his life, and figures to cadge a chaser.
Vice meets a harrowing reward. The poor slob is marooned on a desert island with a prissy goggle-eyed missionary lady (Glynis Johns). Rescued at last, he is thanked by the parson "for sparing her." Ted gasps: "Me! and that sanctimonious, psalm-singing little prig! I've never been so insulted in my life!" The idea so unnerves him, in fact, that he gets smashing drunk to drive it out of his mind. Fadeout : Ted at the harmonium, wheezing away at a hymn, and reeking of salvation quite as repulsively as he ever did of booze.
The Bridges at Toko-ri (Paramount), based on the 1953 novel by James Michener, is one of the best of all the many Hollywood pictures about the Korean war. The movie is a good deal better than the book. And in this case, besides, there is the cold beauty of the jet planes as they flash through black skies like algebraic swans in a futuristic myth.
Michener's story: a young lawyer (played with his usual unspectacular competence by William Holden) is yanked back into the Navy and shipped to the Pacific as a carrier-based pilot flying Panther jets. His boss is an admirable admiral. In fact, the Old Man (played with fine flexibility and insight by Fredric March) is something of a St. Francis in shoulder-wigs, who watches over his flock of birdmen with loving care, and especially over Holden, who reminds him of a son he lost in World War II. In the end, nevertheless, the admiral has to send his boy to almost certain death in a mission against the bridges at Toko-ri. And death it is, though for all too long the audience is teased with the hope of a sentimental save and the chance to see Holden reunited with his wife (Grace Kelly, who does what little her part permits with charm and sensibility).
Shortly before his death the hero asks Michener's question: "Why does it have to be me?" And the picture gives Michener's answer: People back home "act the way they do because they're there. You . . . go on doing your job because you're here. It's just as simple as that." This, though Paramount may shudder to hear it said, is an existentialist answer, and surely a poor one to die on—though just as surely many a man has had to die on it for want of a better reason in his heart.