From the Rental Vault: A Pair of G's

The Battle of Guadalcanal marked the end of Japanese expansion in World War II. Following their defeat there in February 1943, Imperial forces focused on holding territory and eventually, attempting to make Allied advances so costly their enemies would break off and settle peacefully. Had they held the island, the Pacific war might have followed a different course, but no one knows for sure. War correspondent Richard Tregaskis' memoir of his time with the campaign, Guadalcanal Diary, was actually published before the battle's end, in January 1943. Filming of a movie version of the book began in May 1943, and it was released in October.

Today, the movie Guadalcanal Diary probably stands out mostly for its faithfulness to some of the characterizations from the Tregaskis book and for being the film debut of 17-year-old Richard Jaeckel, who had a long career as a character actor. Time has made many of those characterizations stereotypes -- a grizzled noncom, a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn, a no-nonsense officer, a wise-cracking Brooklynite, and so on. It has some pretty good performances -- like the aforementioned proud son of Brooklyn, played by William Bendix and the surprisingly meaty role for Anthony Quinn as an Hispanic Marine treated no differently than his fellows. And given the restrictions of what you could show onscreen in 1943, it provides a pretty good picture of how war can terrify one minute and bore to tears the next.

But being made in the middle of the war, during a time when the outcome still wasn't certain and American men were dying at the hands of an enemy, Diary takes a dim and ultimately flat view of the Japanese soldiers the Marines were fighting (note the broad-shouldered shirtless Marine overhead-pressing an enemy soldier in the poster). It's understandable, but it pushes the movie uncomfortably close to propaganda. Even so, if the viewer recognizes that limitation as an unfortunate product of time and place and sets it aside as unrealistic -- after all, the movie fictionalizes the actual battle somewhat as well -- Guadalcanal Diary has a good, tense story to tell and more to show about war and its impact than you might originally guess.

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Pinewood Studios, home in the 1970s and 1980s to both Superman and James Bond, shot its first movies in 1935. It was closed down during World War II, except for production of wartime documentaries, and re-opened after the Allied victory in 1945. The first movie made at Pinewood after it re-opened was the 1946 murder mystery Green for Danger, based on a popular Christianna Brand detective novel of the same name.

A postman during World War II London is injured by a V-1 "buzz bomb" and taken to a rural English hospital. He dies on the operating table, and not long after, a nurse is murdered. Scotland Yard Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) is sent to investigate, and his peculiar and definitely abrupt manner stretch the tensions of the already-anxious staff to the breaking point. When a second murder is attempted, Cockrill closes in on his prey, but will he outwit the killer in time?

Green benefits from a tight, no-frills screenplay from director Sidney Guilliat and Claud Gurney. The former had written for Alfred Hitchcock, and the latter had a solid history directing London theater. It also boasts strong performances from Sim, Trevor Howard and Leo Genn as feuding doctors and Rosamund John, Sally Gray and Megs Lindley as nurses. It's an unaccountably forgotten top-rate mystery that gives us, in Sim's rumpled, absent-minded but brilliant detective, a sort of old English uncle of Peter Falk's rumpled, absent-minded but brilliant Lieutenant Columbo.

Brand wrote seven Inspector Cockrill mysteries in all, and Pinewood may have thought of making a series of them. But the movie struggled getting screened in its home country -- censors originally banned it entirely because they thought a hopsital-set murder might frighten soldiers returning home and keep them from seeking medical help. Of course, while the novel was set in a military hospital, the movie wasn't, so the ban was lifted. But all of the rigamarole may have soured Pinewood on the idea; the only other mystery adapted from Brand's books was a 1947 version of her debut, Death in High Heels. Another of her characters, Nurse Matilda from her children's series of the same name, became Nanny McPhee when adapted by Emma Thompson.

Sim, of course, went on to be renowned for his Christmas Eve haunting by three spirits in 1951's Scrooge, reprising the role in a 1971 animated feature of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. He continued to work in movies and on stage until his death in 1976 from lung cancer.