Home of the Brave

Writer-director Stanley Kramer remains famous for his painfully earnest dramas about big social issues, with 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner probably being the best known. But he actually began his career with another high-minded film dealing with racial bigotry—this 1949 effort that Mark Robson directed for Kramer's newly formed production company. Although based on a 1945 play by Arthur Laurents about a Jew who suffered discrimination from his fellow soldiers during World War II, Carl Foreman's script makes the victim a black man whose eventual paralysis is the psychosomatic result of the prejudice he felt from his comrades during a mission to a Japanese-occupied Pacific island. The film is bluntly didactic in the mode of much postwar liberal idealism, and the psychological resolution is absurdly cut-and-dried; but the film boasts a strong cast, with James Edwards a stalwart protagonist in the character of Pvt. Peter Moss, and Lloyd Bridges, Frank Lovejoy, and Steve Brodie excellent as fellow soldiers. A low-budget feature, Robson tried to make the most out of limited resources, although much of the island action (obviously shot on a soundstage) doesn't mesh terribly well with the incorporated archival footage. Many viewers will also surely be troubled by the stereotypical treatment of the Japanese in a movie that purportedly promotes racial tolerance. Even so, Home of the Brave still packs a substantial emotional punch. Recommended. (F. Swietek)