BATTLE HYMN
(Universal-International) G Cert. "HE conscience of Colonel Dean Hess, whose real life story Battle Hymn tells, was no doubt genuinely troubled by a bomb he dropped on an orphanage in Germany, so I’m sorry to have to say that this is a very poor film. Because he felt a failure as a preacher, Dean Hess returned to the air force in Korea. I was as bewildered as his wife by his Cecision (as the film relates it), and not less so when he explained that he was only going to train others-for war from the air, of course. In the end he was actively involved; but he also started an unofficial orphanage for several hundred children and saw them evacuated
to safety. Now, I’m more vulnerable to children suffering in war than to almost anything, but this film is so marred by moral confusion and tasteless treatment than even the sequences concerning the children hardly moved me. (It was good to see them streaming towards the evacuation planes.) I don’t even blame Rock Hudson too much for his playing of a part that even a real actor wouldn't have found easy. Battle Hymn just took the wrong road at the start and kept right on. Douglas Sirk directed, and it’s only as I write this that I realise he also perpetrated Written on the Wind.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570510.2.46.1.3
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 26
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227BATTLE HYMN New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 926, 10 May 1957, Page 26
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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