ONE STAR GENERAL

The myth of the Great Man (1955) is again stripped down to the facts, some of them not very nice, when Charley Bronson, General, makes a hero's return from Korea, and Harry Williams, a former war correspondent and columnist, now his press agent and official best friend, fills in. So does Margaret, his wife, in her own words an ""aging tramp"" who has used liquor- or men- to balance off the emptiness of her marriage; and between the two of them Charley's life is reconstructed through occasional, revealing incidents. Dedicated to a career he hated- the Army- by an obligation to his parents, destroyed by guilt in the death of the girl he loved- Margaret's sister, Charley had been trying ever since to find a man who would ""countersign his death warrant""; on patrols during the war when he took spectacular risks; later, when in command of a repple depple known as Bronson's Bastille he goaded a captain into taking a shot at him; and still later in Korea where his indifference to death resulted in a decisive victory which returns him a hero- and for the first time a husband to the woman he had married.... A tricky synchronization of the past and the present, this has, along with the picturesque vernacular and hard-hitting pace which is to be expected, an undisguised compassion which is not. Make no mistake about its readability!