Though beautiful if perhaps accidental timing, the Navy's current screams for more carriers are being backed up by a better-than-average battle movie which is almost exactly half documentary. Describing the career of a naval aviator form 1923 to the present, "Task Force" is actually the story of the aircraft carriers, which the Navy claims won the last war in the Pacific and insists will win the next war too.

The plot itself is simple, unpretentious, and harmless. Gary Cooper is a Navy flyer who takes part in the first carrier-landing experiments, marries a buddy's widow, and is exiled to a desk in the Canal Zone after pleading aviation's case too violently at a Washington reception. Eventually he gets back on a carrier, and he is on the spot at Pearl Harbor when the shooting starts.

Soon after, the film switches from black-and-white to technicolor and becomes extremely exciting. Most of this second half of "Task Force" consists of actual battle scenes filmed by the Navy; they are reminiscent of the wartime "Fighting Lady." the scenes which show a busy combat formation center deep inside the carrier are intensely interesting, and the views of the carrier deck, jammed from side to side with blazing aircraft against a backdrop of explosions and tracers in the deep blue sky, are unforgettable. Cooper and the other actors are skilfully blended into these newsreels between flashes of exploding Zeroes and miles of cloud-covered ocean.

The villain of the piece, a Navy-hating senator, remarks that the burning and sinking of several carriers at the Coral Sea and Midway is not an argument for more carriers. As it happens, the most striking parts of this film show our carriers being severely damaged. The argument of the movie's admirals is that they intend to carry the war to the Japanese homeland; this never happens in the film, and in the actual war the Army Air Forces did some bombing too. If the movie settles the interservice conflict for you, there is a recruiting van full of bluejackets parked in front of the Metropolitan Theater.