Three from Britain

From England last week came three pictures which, though they may never make millions at U.S. box offices, demonstrate the polish of British moviemakers:

The Dam Busters (Associated British; Warner), despite its unimaginative titte, illustrates the quality and style of Britain's individual achievements during World War II. The hero of the picture is a five-ton bomb, and though other nations might pridefully point to their own comparable glories, few but the British could have fashioned such a compelling and straightforward drama.

To Scientist-Engineer Barnes Wallis, came the idea for a strange new bomb capable of destroying the massive dams at the gateway to the Ruhr Valley. His brainstorm: a spherical missile dropped from 60 feet, at 235 m.p.h., would bounce for 600 yards along the water to the dam wall, sink 30 feet and detonate.

When at length Wrallis licked the bomb's structural problems, the question of tactical delivery brought new ones. But in May 1943, Wing Commander Guy Gibson and his elite crews headed out low over the black skin of the North Sea. They found their main targets--the Moehne and Eder Dams--dropped their bombs like bowling balls and watched the dams split like so many papier-mache pins. The deadly strikes flooded factory towns and rolled up one of Britain's highest scores of the war.

Told with just enough of the semi-documentary flavor to give the film a precise clarity, The Dam Busters stands up equally well as good drama and knowing characterization of its principals. Michael Redgrave is intense and human as a dedicated Barnes Wallis buffeted about by bureaucracy.

Court Martial (Romulus; Kingsley), based on a 1953 play titled Carrington, V.C., restricts its action almost wholly to a military courtroom, where Major "Copper" Carrington (David Niven) stands trial for 1) being AWOL, 2) misapplication of regimental funds, and 3) entertaining a woman in his barracks bedroom.

Carrington is indeed up against it: he has a distant, neurotic wife (Margaret Leighton), a jealous commander, and is himself pretty foolhardy. The most serious charge--misapplication--he can defend best if he can prove that he gave his commander fair warning before he took -L-125 from the battery safe in lieu of back pay. But his commander perjures himself, and Carrington's wife, who could save the day, refuses to help. Thus the story focuses on one of the great pillars of man-made law: the rules of evidence. The military judges know for a fact that the defendant is innocent; yet, for lack of proper evidence, Carrington is found guilty.

However, not even the law-respecting British can let the hero suffer such a wrong at the box office, so a twist ending should make all Niven fans happy.

The Divided Heart (J. Arthur Rank; Republic) also deals with law, but it has a truer ring. It replays with touching realism the actual story of Bavarian foster parents who reared their little boy for seven years, only to be confronted one day in 1952 by the boy's long-lost Yugoslav mother.

With both sides fighting for the boy, the case goes before the U.S. Court of the Allied High Commission in Germany, where three judges must decide the child's future. First the Yugoslav--the "blood mother"--recites in flashbacks the tormenting story of her partisan husband's death at the hands of the Nazis, the murder of her two daughters, the abduction of the child, and finally, her internment in Auschwitz. Then the German--the "bread mother"--tells her moving history of the adoption of the boy, her struggles against the invading Russians, and at last, the peace that surrounded her family's life before a United Nations repatriation team discovered the boy.

It is a tribute to the candor and restraint of the picture that most moviegoers will be reluctant to decide for themselves between the blood and the bread mother. Explains the Chief Justice (Alexander Knox): The law books do not serve in such a case, for justice defeats itself if in its application the good are made to suffer.

Cornell Borchers and Armin Dahlen are excellent as the bread parents. So is the blood mother, Yvonne Mitchell, who carries the memory of the concentration camp in her brooding face. The ten-year-old boy is Michel Ray, who comes off as a fine trouper.

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