The final entry of John Huston's wartime documentary trilogy, playing haunted homecoming to the bugle-tooting
of Report from the Aleutians and the battered irony of The Battle of San Pietro. Commissioned to document
shell-shocked WWII vets returning from abroad, Huston mounted his cameras in a Long Island psychiatric clinic
to chart the treatment of a dozen or so "casualties of the spirit" -- mentally maimed soldiers carrying battleground
horrors within themselves. Huston's approach is mostly "artless" observation (though cinematographer Stanley Cortez
dabs some chiaroscuro onto blank walls), with sensitive emphasis on faces and expressions and a patient ear for
voices and broken speech patterns. Yet the picture's martyrized reputation (rhapsodies by James Agee, more than
three decades of suppression by the U.S. War Department) seems timid to these contemporary eyes: its courage
gets undercut by an unwavering belief in the infallibility of military recovery methods, so that a sodium amytal shot
or a hypnotism session is more than enough to sooth a chronic stutter or revive psychologically atrophied legs.
Far from the ancestor of the vérité aesthetic of Wiseman, Pennebaker or Leacock, the film's impetus is largely
regenerative, tying up misfit strands into the fabric of postwar America, wishing the invariably reformed patients
godspeed to "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Were there no relapses? No hidden demons? No sense of
betrayal? By the time the former ward wrecks have fused into a vigorous baseball team, Huston has assembled
a classless, racially integrated vision as touchingly utopian as the old prospector's agrarian pueblo idyll in The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre -- and just as much at odds with the country's offscreen reality. Narrated by Walter
Huston. Music by Dimitri Tiomkin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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