"The Big Lift" recounts most obtusely the story of the Berlin airlift. It is a long pull, is my decision, for both audience and airmen. Briefly, this movie offers no surprises, tension, credible characters, credible plot, or creditable photography--only, in fact, a few nervous laughs drawn from the lines of the usually funnier Paul Douglas.

It may as well be considered that some of the historical fabric of the picture is fairly enjoyable. It was framed in Berlin itself, and a little of the agony and destruction of the country is caught. A single little shovel digging methodically into an infinite pile of rubble is about as grimly futile as Tantalus' hopeless reach for the fruit.

So far so good. The trouble all stems from the point (early in the picture) when the pitiable plot is poured over the documentary background like a thick, opaque syrup over pancakes. This movie succeeds in throwing part of the background into obscurity, and nearly all of the remainder into a particularly sticky context. Montgomery Clift and Douglas each find girl friends in Berlin. Clift, who has sensitive sympathetic channels, is overcome by the signs of the stricken city and is drawn to his girl to the extent of wishing to take her into Holy Matrimony. She, however, is simply deluding him in order to get to a friend, who is presumably still a Nazi, in St. Louis. Douglas' girl trots through the picture asking insane questions about the U. S., and representing unconsciously, symbolically, the problem of the German national character. She, and implicitly, the German, is possessed of a father complex, which permits easy control by a usurper. An afternoon's reading of the Constitution of the United States, however, enables her to hurdle her own necrosis and discover a new, improved meaning to life.

The acting is uniformly poor, Clift's contribution is virtually nil, and Douglas', though he gets off a few good ones for such a sleepy guy, is negligible. Altogether, the audience is easily as exultant at the finish of "The Big Lift" as the combined reactions of all the men who played the original performance.