Go for Broke!

Robert Pirosh wrote his own picture and did a wonderful job of directing it, and 'Go for Broke!', his tribute to Japanese-American volunteers fighting in World War II, is deftly executed with a nice blend of pulse-quickening action and more thought-provoking interludes where white Lieutenant Grayson (Van Johnson), originally prejudiced against the people he is assigned to command, gradually learns to come to terms with the fact that bravery and patriotism are irrelevant to your race or the color of your skin.

That could all be a little too rhetorical for its own good, but Pirosh never over-stresses his point, and his picture is never holier-than-thou. "You see, Sir, I'm from Texas", Grayson says to his superior, but Pirosh lets it go at that and doesn't lash out against Southern bigotry. I really liked the gentle irony of Pirosh' contrasting the idyllic, outdated guidebooks to Italy and France that Grayson reads with the prosaic reality of war-torn countries.