ONE FOR HOLLYWOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 768, 9 April 1954, Page 12

ONE FOR HOLLYWOOD

BATTLE CRY, by Leon M. Uris; Allan Wingate, New Zealand price 12/6. HIS is another of those great American novels about the American War in the Pacific; interminably" long, interminably dull, printed on cheap paper with off-centre layouts in heavy type; full of platitude and sentiment, the same adolescent wisecracks, the bad language, the incomprehensible service slang, flashbacks, italics, and the Marine’s Hymn. Needless to say, Hollywood is already making it a film. The cast is ready-made: the AllAmerican boy, the tough Marine sergeant with a heart of gold, the funny fat boy, the big Swede lumberjack, the Red Indian with the corny comiic-book lines, the Jew who makes good, the re-form-school Polack who gives his life to save the patrol, the cowardly lieuten-

ant, the drunks, the tough major who fights for a place for his battalion at the head of the assault, the general who is the "meanest sonofabitch in the Corps," the usual women and a singing cowboy. The unit in the story is a battalion of the 6th Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, which was camped near McKay’s Crossing, north of Paekakariki, before leaving for Guadalcanal in December, 1942, and again for some months in 1943 while recovering from battle and malaria after that campaign. It fought also on Tarawa, in a mopping-up role, and headed the assault on Saipan. The author’s chief (and often inaccurate) memories of New Zealand are of the beauty of the scenery, of hospitable towns and too hospitable women, "the funny way of talking and the funny money," "the strange smell of foreign cooking." It is perhaps unkind of a foreigner to draw attention to the author’s English, but his writing is juvenile and unfeeling, and surely he knows that an epitaph is not a curse,

W.A.

G.