GORDON halted outside a great, garish picture-house. He hated the pictures, of course, seldom went there even when he could afford it.
Why encourage the art that is destined to replace literature?"
So wrote George Orwell in his 1936 novel, "Keep the Aspidistra Flying," but it is not a vignette that makes it into Robert Bierman's
"The Merry War," the new film adapted from the book. That comically high-minded rebuke hangs
over the movie, though, and over every attempt to bring the work of this gifted, peculiar writer to the screen.