Word: zack
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Year of Plenty. In Brooklyn, N.Y., Mrs. Zack Gabel bore her fourth child in eleven months-twins again...
...life. Good and moving as it sometimes is, it leaves much to be said which, for the sake of the many neuropsychiatric casualties who are already returning from the war, badly needs saying to American civilians. The picture's crucial weakness: it confronts its fumbling, humiliated, pitiful soldier Zack (Joseph Cotten) with a girl (Ginger Rogers) who, instead of being reasonably average, is also a decidedly special case. Zack is on Christmas furlough from an Army psychiatric hospital; Mary is on Christmas furlough from a penitentiary...
Such artificiality, falling far short of universal human interest, also leads to painfully irrelevant storytelling: the girl spends a large part of the picture deceiving Zack, first for her own good, later for his. And in the course of pampering this sort of overspecialized pathos, the far more pathetic and important story which the picture pretends to tell gets pretty thoroughly tear-dimmed...
...Faithful. There are also moments of franker pain and shock than most films dare to hand an audience without Boris Karloff to reassure them it is all in fun-a scene with a screwily bellicose veteran of World War I (Chill Wills-see cut), a horrible fracas between Zack and a dog, a still grimmer scene in which Zack, alone in his Y.M.C.A. room, all but drowns in a maelstrom of the unforgettable noises of combat...
...When Zack and his girl stroll through subdued, snowless winter country, the landscape is photographed with an appreciation of the power and subtlety of weather that most U.S. moviemakers seem to lack. When Zack invites his new friends to a New Year's Eve party at the Y, the crowd there is precisely as it should be. So are the decorations and so-a typical Selznick touch-is the sailor, off at the side, solemnly working himself into a lather on the parallel bars. (Other Selznick touches: a stuffy senator asking Zack how the boys overseas are thinking politically...