Word: tripolis
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Americans are already deeply indebted to the Marines of Wake and Midway, but making pictures like "To the Shores of Tripoli" is no way to pay off the debt. In fact, a few more like it and the Marines will be the laughing as well as the fighting stock of the nation. The acting isn't bad--John Payne, Maureen O'Hara and Randolph Scott have no trouble giving adequate performances. But any resemblance between the story here and a good plot, or between this film and an honest-to-goodness he-man thriller is very well camouflaged. Instead...
...thrust in Africa, before the peak heat comes, flew about in Rome last week like leaves in a skittish wind. Some said the offensive had already started with stepped-up R.A.F. activity over the Libyan deserts. Others reported that Anglo-American naval forces had concentrated "in the neighborhood of Tripoli." No Axis nerves were soothed when the Giornale d'ltalia announced that "the Anglo Saxons have succeeded recently in transporting strong reinforcements to their Egyptian bases...
Nazi reconnaissance planes discovered a flotilla of powerful British destroyers which may have been steaming toward the rumored naval concentration off Tripoli. Swarms of Heinkel & Junkers dive-bombers swooped down on the destroyers in midafternoon, sank the 1,935-ton Lively on their first attack, were driven off by British Beaufighters on their second, sank the 1,695-ton Kipling on a third go and so severely damaged her sister ship the Jackal that the British sank her next day. The signs of increasing Axis activity might simply be provoked by an Allied success in the war of nerves...
...Shores of Tripoli (20th Century-Fox) is Hollywood's first long look at the real pros of the U.S. armed forces: the Marines. So long as it keeps a Technicolored eye on their activities at the San Diego Marine Corps Base, it is a rousing picture...
...Tripoli's story is the old one about the ex-Marine (Minor Watson) who dumps his playboy son (John Payne) on his old sergeant pal (Randolph Scott) to be made a man of. It ambles through a romance with an almost unbearably beautiful nurse (Maureen O'Hara), a fight, a near court-martial, a rescue at sea. They make a Marine out of the young scamp, all right, but it hardly seems worthwhile, cinematically...