Cinema: The New Pictures, Jul. 9, 1951

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Along with their uncommon courage and skill, the flipper-footed, goggle-eyed warriors in swimming trunks bring to the picture the nightmarish excitement of their strange underwater battlefield. Even above the surface, the simple techniques of the frogmen going into action are dramatically detailed: at a rhythmic signal, each man flops out of a destroyer's speeding launch, flattens for a moment on a small rubber raft fastened alongside, then peels off into the sea as the next signal sends another man on to the skimming raft in his place. Below the surface, in a weirdly lighted world of coral, fish and man-made barriers, the frogmen reconnoiter the defenses of a Pacific invasion beach while others of their unit deliberately draw fire from a beach nearby.

Long before the transports arrive, the frogmen mine the concrete and steel traps with lung-bursting patience, blast them out of the path of the assault troops. Donning rubber suits and shoulder-fitted oxygen tanks, they give the picture its most gripping sequence by slipping through the steel net of a Japanese harbor to mine its submarine pens. For good measure, the movie tosses in a tense situation aboard the frogmen's destroyer (commanded by Gary Merrill), when Widmark and Andrews undertake the ticklish job of disarming an unexploded Japanese torpedo that has pierced the ship's hull.

Director Lloyd Bacon and his technical crew, working with what must be Hollywood's coldest, wettest cast, have handled their subject with skill and resourcefulness. They shot for seven weeks in the waters off Norfolk, Key West and the Virgin Islands, used such special equipment as a seven-ton undersea camera bell, a Navy-developed underwater camera, anti-shark chemicals to protect the actors. John Tucker Battle's script wisely keeps women out of the picture, serves as a dependable framework for the action scenes that make The Frogmen an arresting movie.

Night into Morning (MGM) unintentionally serves as a fine argument for the escapist entertainment that Hollywood makes best. It is a grim, dolorous movie about a college English professor (Ray Milland) who loses his wife and child in an explosion and searches for a way to go on living without them. He broods endlessly over the tragedy, finds no solace either in drink or in the advances of a tart (Jean Hagen), finally is brought to face life again through the efforts of an understanding friend (Nancy Davis), whose concern over him almost alienates her fiance (John Hodiak).

Despite intelligent performances and a kind of dreary integrity of purpose, Night into Morning mires down in the difficulty of saying anything to comfort the acutely bereaved without sounding platitudinous or inadequate. The effort to dramatize a message of hopeful solace seems even more hopeless, leaves the picture tediously uneventful, as sincere and futile as a note of condolence.