A MEDAL FOR BENNY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 351, 15 March 1946, Page 19

A MEDAL FOR BENNY

(Paramount)

‘THE second half of this film is the better half. At a guess I would think that this latter part is mainly the work of John Steinbeck, whereas his

collaborator on the script, John Wagner, possibly had the chief say in writing the first half. The Steinbeck influence is, of course, apparent throughout the film in the choice of settings and characters: a community of cheerfully lazy and improvident paisanos of mixed Spanish and Indian blood living in shanties on the outskirts of a go-getting Californian town. Quite obviously Mr. Steinbeck approves of people like this, and with some reason, for they are a likeable and even lovable lot-particularly the old man (J. Carrol Naish), who isthe father ‘of Benny, a soldier in the Pacific. When he went away, Benny also left behind him a reputation as a good-for-nothing, and a fiancée (Dorothy Lamour), who tries to remain faithful in spite of the reputation and the ardent wooing of a handsome, feckless fisherman (Arturo de Cordova). These are authentic Steinbeck types, but the early treatment of them clearly owes a good deal to Hollywood, the emphasis being strongly on the boy-girl angle, with Dorothy Lamour alternately fiery and icy in her response to Mr. Cordova’s attentions. But round about half way, Steinbeck takes firmer control of the story and turns it from a vaguely sentimental romance into a biting satire directed against a certain type of businessman and the commercial exploitation of hero-worship. Word | comes that Benny (who does not appear in the film at all, but dominates the action) has been posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honour for killing 100 Japs. With the eyes of the nation turned on. Benny’s home town, the members of the local Chamber of | Commerce set about shamelessly exploiting the situation in the interests: of public prestige and private profit. Benny's father becomes the peg for their civic salesmanship: he must be prised out of his setting of happy-go-lucky poverty and presented to the world as a substantial citizen. But the go-getting schemers of the Chambcr of Commerce over-reach themselves: when the great day for the presentation of the medal arrives, the old man is back in shanty-town, and the general who has come on the President’s behalf must go there to find him (as, of course, he does quite willingly). The businessmen are ruthlessly portrayed by Frank McHugh, Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dingle; and though the brand of social dishonesty which they represent has been pilloried before, it has seldom been treated by Hollywood with such honest anger and withering scorn as it encounters here. In spite of this sting in its tail, however, A Medal for Benny is a little unsure of its purpose: it wavers between sentiment and satire, between romance and realism. But the film has one fixed point of pure excellence-the performance of J. Carrol Naish as the old paisano. For years a modest portrayer of "bit" parts, Mr. Naish is clearly one of the screen’s most accomplished actors.