Whistling in Brooklyn (M.G.M.). Whistle in Brooklyn, and sooner or later a Dodger will turn up. They all turn up toward the climax of this melocomic fracas, in which Red Skelton clowns around in House-of-David-style false whiskers in order to warn a police inspector that the trusted friend sitting next him at a ball game is a homicidal maniac. The story is strenuously pasted together for laughs, but some of its comic assault & battery hits the funnybone, while Red Skelton, his idiotic beard and imbecilic lack of interest in the game he is supposed to pitch, sometimes conflict humorously with the maniacal seriousness of Ebbets Field baseball.
There is also a prolonged slapstick struggle with murderers aboard an old ship. And at one nightmarish juncture M.G.M.'s scripters manage to hang Skelton, Rags Ragland, Ann Rutherford and Jean Rogers, in a gently swinging human chain, from the top of an elevator shaft. High comic moment: Red Skelton, as anchor-man for this gibbering pendulum, decides to rest his hands by letting go and standing on the shoulders of Rags Ragland, who is desperately clinging to Skelton's ankles.
The Memphis Belle (U.S. Eighth Air Force-Paramount) is the name of a Flying Fortress. This 45-minute picture reports the Belle's 25th mission over Germany, which retired her crew to the U.S. The film is chiefly the work of Lieut. Colonel William Wyler, whose last film as a civilian was Mrs. Miniver, a shrewd but somewhat plushy war poster. There is no plush about Memphis Belle. It is one of the few genuinely exciting U.S. documentaries.
All of the combat shots in Memphis Belle were made on the spot. Some other shots of the crew and their comrades were made at leisure, but from start to finish the film never puts on the deadening look of reenactment. The hope and fear on the faces of the flyers when they get their orders to bomb Wilhelmshaven are real hope and fear. The hope and anxiety of the ground crew, waiting through a long, pastoral afternoon for the plane's return are just as real. The joy of both groups when, late and limping, the Belle gets back loses none of its life-&-death resonance because it irresistibly suggests schoolboys and athletes when a victorious team comes home.
The Belle's mission takes its crew among prodigious scenes which have seldom been so well recorded. Even the take-off into the mild sunlight has grandeur. As the swift ground shrivels into easy, floating legibility, cinemaddicts feel that sudden magical suction in the midriff which the actual experience brings. Climax of this effect: a magnificent close-up of the landing gear as it retracts, flattening like the feet of a bird in flight, and disclosing the countryside. Technicolor comes fully into its own when the Belle and the planes of her formation climb steadily over the North Sea, striating the sky with vapor trails, and when (over Germany) the flak begins to pop its thick corn. Shots which are merely powerful in black-&-white become overpoweringly real and immediate in Technicolor. To the layman the actual bombing, for all its excitement, is just an uncommunicative, tremendous tower of smudge. And the trip home, through fierce air fighting, lacks the fine coherent tension which make the first two-thirds of Memphis Belle a remarkable film.