What happens when a man can't do what a man's gotta do? Marlon Brando, in his first film, portrays-with exquisite sensitivity and remarkable physicality-a paraplegic World War II hero/victim struggling to accept his disability. At first a furious rebel against his fate, he keeps his fiancée (Teresa Wright) at bay for years before allowing her, and himself, to witness his condition. But as he builds up his strength, he proves himself to be a real man: he is supple where the able-bodied hero of High Noon (the next film from the Zinnemann, Kramer, Foreman team, see February 25) is rigid, sensitive where Gary Cooper is tortured by doubt. Performance anxiety hovers over both films, but for Brando our hopes are genuine, because this film is real life. As in High Noon, one of the fascinating elements in The Men is its women, and we watch Wright, like Grace Kelly, grow from self-assured liberal to confused realist in the course of one nightmarish wedding day. Here, also, we see the doctor-preacher (Everett Sloane) become a helpless onlooker. Made with the participation of patients in a California veterans hospital as part of the cast, and co-starring Jack Webb in a fine portrayal of a ruined intellectual among them, The Men is a marvelous social drama to usher in the fifties. Sad, but loving, it claims for women the right and responsibility to face up to war's consequences, and for men, the right simply to live.