A Medal for Benny

In the Chicano slums of a small California town, Arturo de Córdova has one hare-brained scheme after another, and he always winds up involving J. Carrol Naish. He's in love with Dorothy Lamour, who's engaged to Naish's absent son, Benny. Eventually de Córdova wears down Miss Lamour's resistance, and she agrees to marry him. He turns over a new leaf. He comes up with enough money to pay off Naish. And then word comes that after Benny was run out of town as a wild boy, he joined the army and now has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Posthumously.

Even though this started out as a story co-written by John Steinbeck, it was embarrassing watching much of the first half of this movie. The characters seem too stereotypical, yet there is some subtlety in the writing as de Córdova and Miss Lamour grow in complexity, even even Naish's simple-minded fellow has a truly good heart. It's in the second half, when the people who run the town, Grant Mitchell and Charles Dingle and Frank McHugh show up, suddenly the Mexican-Americans seem fully formed human beings by contrast, while the important people are caricatures, seeing what a Medal-of-Honor winner can do for them, without considering how a father feels when he has lost his son. Every slight that the modern viewer will see towards the people who live in the slums will be as nothing to the contempt heaped upon the mighty.

The first twenty minutes are tough to get through. But they are amply rewarded by the end.