Review of The Bold and the Brave

I saw this on Mickey Rooney's 93rd (!) birthday. It's in some ways a typical mid 50s U.S. product: One of those titles popular at the time (The Bad And The Beautiful, The Proud And The Profane, etc.), a theme song (co-written by Rooney) played during the opening and end credits, and one of the dubious then trendy widescreen spinoffs, SuperScope (It is hard to judge how well it was used here as the only watcheable copy I was able to find is in the standard TV ratio.) The story of American foot soldiers in Italy in 1944 concentrates on three characters who have a certain amount of psychological depth in the (Oscar nominated) writing. Wendell Corey stars as a cynical, well off guy who's afraid to shoot but not surprisingly gets the courage in the well done climax to fire back and even destroy a German tank. Don Taylor's role is the most complex, as the sergeant Preacher, a hard taskmaster, sexually repressed, and unable to accept when he finally meets a woman that she has already been with others.But Rooney, nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar, has the show stealing big scene, as a gambling obsessed little dynamo, when he plays with dice in a tent full of other soldiers and scrambles for his scattered bills after the lights go out. In the combat scenes that finally come, an hour into the picture, when they go on recon patrol in a forest, he gets killed trying to retrieve some of these winnings.(The rock formations later in this scene are a giveaway that the movie was shot not in Italy but in Southern California.) Rooney's acting throughout is hyper, wound up, almost as if he were on pep pills during the shooting.Director Lewis Foster, based on his credits, looks worthy of further study.