Kings Go Forth (Frank Ross-Eton Production; United Artists), the Hollywood mistreatment of a capable war novel by Joe David Brown (TIME, April 9, 1956), is one of those embarrassing pictures that say all the right things but obviously do not understand what they mean. It says that war is hell, that love is holy, that color is only skin-deep, that insincerity is the root of all evil. But it says all these things as a parrot requests a cracker, by rote and without conviction ; and instead of conviction, the picture offers a tediously sentimental farewell to arms and a rather painful exhibition of the sort of placebo liberalism that finds no difficulty in accepting racial equality—provided, of course, that the Negroes in question are well educated, successful in business, and look just like white people.
The story is set in the South of France in the midst of what Author Brown called "the champagne campaign" of 1944. His heroes, a slum-bunny lieutenant (Frank Sinatra) and a rich-kid sergeant (Tony Curtis), fight the Germans all week in the hills, fight the booze all weekend on the Riviera. Then Sinatra meets a pretty girl (Natalie Wood) and falls in love with her, even though her mother (Leora Dana), a U.S. expatriate, has informed him that the girl's father was a Negro.
Not an ordinary Negro, mind you. He was a black Horatio Alger, who started out totin' them bales and wound up president of a big insurance company. What with that and the fact that the girl looks just as white as he does, the lieutenant lets his good instincts prevail. "A lot of people," he remarks with a superior air, "need somebody to look down on."
With the sergeant it is another story. He makes love to the heroine, promises to marry her, but at the last minute casually breaks it off. "Mrs. Blair," he tells the mother without turning a hair, "I've been engaged to some girls, and not engaged to some girls, if you know what I mean. And some of them weren't the kind I'd 've taken to the country club. But with the exception of your daughter, all of them were white." The heroine tries to commit suicide; the lieutenant spends the rest of the picture trying to kill the sergeant. In the book they both succeeded, but in the picture the girl survives to exemplify the moviemakers' striking contribution to contemporary sociology—a general solution for the social and emotional problems of the mulatto. The solution: give up sex.
The Vikings (Bryna Productions; United Artists) of this picture are going to make more money in a couple of months than the vikings of history did in a couple of centuries. Anyway, that is what Kirk Douglas expects, and he can ill afford to be wrong. As producer of the picture, he spent more than $4,000,000 to rent a fiord in Norway, a castle in France and studio space in West Germany; to build a 30-acre viking village and to vegetate the countryside with 4,000 bushy-bearded extras; to reproduce a navy of 33 viking ships—a flotilla only slightly smaller than the Norwegian battle fleet; to man his foredecks with such well-known Scandinavians as Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh; and to hire, as the big name for his billboard, Actor Kirk Douglas.