Among the patients we see from their arrival at Mason General through their treatments, cures and releases are men suffering from amnesia, hysterical paralysis, stuttering and acute melancholia. Yet it's not difficult to understand the force of the film. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert and David Maysles. With its voice-over narration (provided by Walter Huston), its use of wipes and dissolves and its full-orchestra soundtrack music, ''Let There Be Light'' is an amazingly elegant movie, far different from the kind of documentaries we're now used to and pioneered by such post-World War II film makers as Morris Engel, Robert Drew, D.A.
AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT THE MOVIE MOVIE
The treatment involved the thenrevolutionary use of truth drugs and hypnosis and, though the movie tells us more than once that the cures we see will have to be supported by long, intensive psychiatric care, the impression given and even encouraged by the film is of a series of miraculous cures. ''Let There Be Light'' is a good, slickly made documentary about the treatment of psychoneurotic combat veterans at Mason General Hospital on Long Island. At this late date, it's difficult to see what the fuss is about. Though the picture is now, at long last, opening a limited run today at the Thalia, the Army - which didn't supply this print - apparently continues to be alarmed. The late James Agee wrote about it with enthusiasm in Time and The Nation in 19. That's not to say the film has gone unheralded.
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FOR more than 30 years, the United States Army has been suppressing public showings of ''Let There Be Light,'' one of the documentaries made for the Army Signal Corps by John Huston toward the end of World War II.