"Command Decision" was a good book and a better play; Hollywood has thrown in just enough stars and situations to kill most of its effectiveness. The movie follows its predecessors pretty closely, detailing an Air Force General's fight against top brass and public pressure to complete a tough bombing operation. He is then kicked upstairs out of his job with the mission incomplete; his successor must make the command decision of whether or not to continue the costly operation.

On Broadway, Paul Kelly played the General with amazing conviction. Clark Gable, who runs things in the movie, simply wrinkles his forehead and looks sincere. The rest of the cast, and there is a lot of it, wears immaculate uniforms and strides stiffly through Hollywood-brand operations rooms. Only Van Johnson, amazingly enough, who has a set-up part as the General's cynical aide, can touch the acting of the stage version. The play's wonderful single set has been augmented with shots of model B-17s plowing into picturesque English landscape; when the command decision is finally made, the surprise is less than startling.

But the biggest objection to "Command Decision" as a film is the way it handles war fought on the executive level. The screen is filled with maps, charts, tables of plane losses, and movies-within-movies of the latest German jet-fighters. The Generals push their map-pins and calculate their losses with a pleasant detachment from reality, unfortunately near the conventional idea of all military command. This was not true of the play; it is not characteristic of all films. "Paisan," which showed just how good war movies could be, had a command decision too, in an episode involved with guerrilla warfare in the lonely river marshes north of Rome, but "Paisan's" decision involved active people, not figures on a chart. And the difference shows up in the relative emotional punch of the two pictures. "Command Decision" is no waste of time; it is often funny and occasionally penetrating. It is well above the usual wild-blue-yonder movie. But it has been sufficiently made-up and costumed until its insight has been submerged under a lot of carefully cleaned-and-pressed brass.