Cinema: The New Pictures, Oct. 20, 1952

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Back at the Front (Universal-International) continues the service misadventures of Cartoonist Bill Mauldin's famed infantrymen, Willie (Tom Ewell) and Joe (Harvey Lembeck). In last year's Up Front, Willie and Joe (then played by David Wayne) were dodging the MPs in Naples during World War II. In Back at the Front, they are still dodging the MPs, this time in Tokyo during the Korean war.

The helter-skelter chases—e.g., from an off-limits Japanese bathhouse to an airport—are conducted by practically every means of locomotion from foot to Army truck. Also involved are a renegade American (Russell Johnson) smuggling explosives into North Korea, a slinky Eurasian (Mari Blanchard), a harassed MP major (Vaughn Taylor) and an apoplectic general (Barry Kelley).

Mauldin's pen & ink infantrymen from Stars & Stripes were a biting commentary on the long-suffering dogfaces of World War II. By surrounding Willie and Joe with a threadbare plot and substituting slapstick for the original's realism, Back at the Front succeeds in making Willie and Joe look more like two-dimensional comic-strip characters than they ever have before.

Hurricane Smith (Nat Holt; Paramount) is a flurry of low melodrama on the high seas. Included in the excitement: pirates taking over a slave ship, a battle between the ship's officers and the shanghaied crew, a hunt for buried treasure in the South Seas, a fight between a shark and Hurricane Smith (John Ireland). Also aboard is an exotic half-Polynesian girl (Yvonne de Carlo) who does a native love dance on the deck of the pirate ship dressed in the sketchiest of sarongs.

What with all the mutinies, floggings, knife duels, fist fights and shootings, most of the cast gets killed off, the villains get their due, and strong-jawed Ireland gets both the treasure and Yvonne. With its excess of haphazard and murkily motivated action, Hurricane Smith is likely to leave the moviegoer at sea most of the time.

Bonzo Goes to College (Universal-International) finds Bonzo, "the world's most educated chimp," enrolled at an institution of higher learning and winning the big football game for his alma mater as a razzle-dazzle quarterback. Bonzo* also caddies on a golf course, brushes his teeth (and then eats the toothpaste), takes a bubble bath and displays the finest of table manners while dining on mashed bananas, banana fritters and banana shortcake.

A sporadically amusing spoof, Bonzo Goes to College leans almost entirely for its laughs on the mugging of its sawed-off leading man. Looking something like a cross between Mickey Rooney and William Bendix in a porkpie hat, Eton jacket and long trousers and suspenders, Bonzo somehow manages to keep the show going without any visible assistance from writers, director and supporting cast.

Yankee Buccaneer (Universal-International) is vaguely based on the life & times of U.S. Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, whose classic "Damn the torpedoes!" was uttered when he sailed through the Confederate mine fields during the battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. The picture is a Technicolored version of some of Farragut's pre-Civil War activities when he sailed in 1823 on a U.S. mosquito fleet assigned to scuttle West Indies pirate ships.