Cinema: The New Pictures, Apr. 8, 1957

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The onlooker catches the fever, and with his camera Director Mann works insidiously to drive it up. Never for an instant does he let the moviegoer escape from the appalling situation the platoon is in. Never for an instant does the moviegoer know where he is—or where They are. He marches, hides, fights, watches every minute with the fighting men, and the watching is the worst. For as the watcher stares down his gunsights into the bright summer grasses, and the sun and the wind play mazily together in the barley and field flowers, and the watcher goes on waiting and waiting for death to leap at him out of the purest loveliness, there comes a moment when any averagely sensitive person will begin to get that cold sensation along his spine, and to realize a little how a fighting man feels when he is buying a Section Eight.