Word: ren
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That salute is characteristic of Preston Sturges' treatment of a theme which might more normally interest Theodore Dreiser or some true-confessions Dumas. Sturges, like René Clair, has always understood the liberating power of blending comedy and realism, wild farce and cool intellect. But the best of the domestic and anarchic satire cannot be suggested on paper; it is too thoroughly cinematic. It reaches its perfection in William Demarest, whose performance is one of the few solid-gold pieces of screen acting in recent years. But chief credit for The Miracle must go to Sturges, who has given...
...because it is smashed before it has a chance to crystallize. Most of the finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit. His good friend and master, René Clair, is near the heart of it when he says, "Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance: he wants to do everything at once. If he could slow down, he would be great; he has an enormous gift and he should be one of our leading creators...
Meanwhile Sturges has two pictures waiting in the can. One is called Hail the Conquering Hero. The other, Great Without Glory, is an adaptation of René Fülöp-Miller's Triumph Over Pain, which was the story of anesthesia. It is still the story of anesthesia-but it is also a Sturges farce. It remains to be seen what Sturges might do with really major material, such a Seven Against Thebes, or the Oberammergau Players...
...majority speaks for active resistance groups. The spokesman for resistance is a member called René Ferrière (who for security reasons cannot be photographed or described). Ferrière calls himself "le français du trottoir"-the Frenchman in the street. When he arrived in Algiers, he was as unaware as most Frenchmen of the confusion there. He had expected much: "After two days," he said, "I was completely bewildered, cried all night and intended to return to France the next day." He has stayed long enough to see the leading men of Vichy cleaned...
...bombers did not return. Two days later another coordinated series of punches, climaxed by another massive Fortress-Liberator raid on the synthetic oil center of Gelsenkirchen, cost the Allies only ten heavies, two Marauders and five fighters. Again two days later a somewhat smaller raid on Düren, coordinated with diversionary attacks, was accomplished without the loss of a single bomber...