Ever since the first producer discovered it was bad business to hurt people's feelings, movie-making has been an industry in sneakers, carefully and profitably tip-toeing around any problem liable to jar the customer's ego. During these 40-odd years, Hollywood has kept its eye fixed steadily on the Box Office as the one valid index of public morality and has consequently built up a picture of American life which is as false as it is glossy and as harmful as it is complacent. Now, at last, this bright veneer shows signs of wearing thin. Movies are beginning to talk in earnest and without apologies about how people actually live and how they treat each other. It is a wonderful, healthy sign.

"Home of the Brave" admits for the first time that there are in this country two classes of citizens, white and black, and that the black semi-citizens resent like hell being pushed around. Furthermore, they want something done about it--fast. But Negroes know that before they can be accepted as full citizens, they must first be recognized as real and complete human beings, with feelings that can be hurt and turned sour. Screen Plays Corporation and director Mark Robson set out to demonstrate this first truth without any mumbling or crossed fingers. What they want to show is simply this: If you hate a black man for being black, he hates your guts for being a bigot. And if you needle him long enough, he's liable to go out of his mind--just as you would. It is not a very fancy message, and it doesn't make for a pleasant, vapid evening at the movies. It is grim and chilling like the problem it poses, and it is just as true as the little green apples God is supposed to have made.

The timeless process of insult, hatred, frustration, collapse and final resigned slavery cannot be jammed into 90 brief minutes without showing the strain. "Home of the Brave" is a good motion picture. It is not, unfortunately, an excellent one, and its influence may be less than hoped for. In order to get their point across and make it somewhat palatable, which may or may not be a weakness, the producers have chosen to fall back on the ancient vehicle of psychiatry to explain the important issues. They have further disturbed the story of a young Negro surveyor alone among white soldiers on a dangerous wartime reconnaissance mission by the inclusion of a series of glib, easily-typed characters, each with a varying degree of racial bias. The result is pat and talky, and effect that remains through to the traditionally "happy" ending. It is hard to believe that a lifetime of acute unhappiness, a lifetime of being treated as something of a freak, and a harrowing combat patrol can be completely wiped out of one's consciousness by a couple of narco-sythesis treatments.

But these are, in the long run, minor criticisms of style rather than content. The people who produced "Home of the Brave" and acted in it had something important on their minds, and they spoke it out with great clarity and courage. For James Edwards, who played the young Negro soldier, there can be nothing but the highest praise. He lived his part, as he has all his life.