Celluloid Heroes

I don’t mind the one with my name on it. It’s the one addressed “To whom it may concern” I don’t like.

The invasion of Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, launched the Solomon Islands Campaign, what you could consider the middle stage or second act of the Second World War in the Pacific. The fight in the Solomons was, in many ways, the real war in the Pacific Theater of Operations. This was the period in which the two sides were closely matched and the outcome of the war was actually at stake. After this campaign, the remainder of the war largely consisted of a Japanese holding action against the United States’ inexorable march west toward the Home Islands.

This adaptation of war correspondent Richard Tregaskis’ non-fiction book about the early stages of the battle is reverential, faithful to the facts but clichéd and lacking in realistic drama. The Marines in this movie seem more like a Cub Scout troop in an episode of Father Knows Best than a real military unit. Even the level of interpersonal conflict found in Sands of Iwo Jima would have vastly improved this film.

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How much do you know about your uncle?

Shadow of a Doubt is the odd but interesting child of the mating of Alfred Hitchcock and playwright Thornton Wilder. It doesn’t represent the best work of each but the pair is still worthwhile nonetheless.

We meet Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten) in Philadelphia as a nattily dressed man lying in a cheap Philadelphia apartment. His nosy and talkative landlady pokes her head into tell him that two men are looking for him. The film doesn’t let us in on the secret of who they are and why they. He slips out and eludes them. Deciding to lie low, he wires his sister, Emma Newton(Patricia Collinge) in Santa Rosa, California that he’s coming to visit for a while. This is music to the ears of his neice and namesake, Charlie (Teresa Wright), who thinks that her favorite worldly uncle will be just the thing to bring some excitement to her boring small town existence.

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