“So Proudly We Hail,” a movie which shows what it is like to make love in the foxholes of Bataan, on the decks of troop transports and in the rocks of Corregidor, is so rotten and the two millions which Paramount spent on making it so obviously distributed in the right directions to get it all back in paid attendances, that the film’s only importance is in indicating certain attitudes of the commercial mind. In war pictures the exhibitors ask, and presumably the audience, “Where is the love interest, leg art and comedy?” By deciding to make a war movie with women protagonists (nurses) Paramount found the answer, ably assisted by the snide movie attitude toward women. The lives of women in the movies are almost exclusively confined to love careers of a dreams-come-true nature. So that whereas audiences wouldn’t stand for a movie which showed Bataan’s soldiers spending half their time making love, they feel it is perfectly natural for movie women to do so, especially if the women are Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake and Paulette Goddard. War or no war, then, the Misses Colbert, Lake and Goddard can devote their nursing life to the fulfilment of their love.
Given this premise, the theatre owners get this cheesecake in hunks so great that much of the movie hinges on Miss Goddard’s black nightie; Miss Colbert’s difficulties as commanding officer become exactly those of a headmistress in a school for young ladies; and the sex resides in Sonny Tufts’s kiss, which Miss Goddard kicks back from as though he had a firecracker in his mouth.
This is the kind of movie that gives me the shakes. It is teeming with varieties of one woman, whose looks, personality and talent for acting are strikingly unsuited to passing instruments in a caesarian operation in the Marivales jungle, or for throwing herself on her stomach under ambulance cars to escape enemy bullets, or speaking of the way the Japanese treated women in Nanking. She has that hard, vacant map that Max Factor could produce on Orphan Annie, and which hides implacably anything out of the way or natural like a thick eyebrow or an underslung jaw, or skin that doesn’t reflect the sun of Bataan like steel plate. Her acting is like Drama Day with the Camp Fire Girls—Now we are in an airplane, girls, now we are tired and distraught, etc. The material she is given to act is a stale romanticism of Dolly Dawn, and her pal, Dolly Dawn, who went on a cruise to Hawaii, and while one falls in love with the handsome doctor who teaches laboratory technique at the University of Hawaii the other, more playful, falls in love with the comical All-American football player named Kansas. This used to be barely acceptable as the plot to display the merits of Bing Crosby’s singing, the Marx Brothers’ comedy or Fred Astaire’s dancing: here it is for serious—for describing Bataan. Accompanying it is a running commentary composed of solid cliché (“. . . after a nerve-wracking trip through the jungle . . .”) spoken off-screen by relays of nurses.
“So Proudly We Hail” is admirably filled with stuff to earn money, but even so the writer shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with murder. He has built a whole movie on the fact that Lt. Janet “Davy” Davidson has been in a coma ever since she was told her lover was given up for lost on a raiding trip. At the beginning of the movie a psychiatrist walks in with a letter from said lover, takes one discouraged reading of Davy’s pulse, and then informs the seven nurses of her unit that he may be able to bring Davy to if they tell him—the doctor—absolutely everything that happened on Bataan. So the nurses tell what being in love on Bataan was like (“after a nerve-wracking trip through the jungle”) in an hour-long flashback, and at the end the doctor says he thinks he can bring her to. He then reads Lieutenant Davidson the letter and she wakes up. I contend a really good psychiatrist would have read Davidson that letter without a flashback.
There are three good things, which seems hardly a fair trade for two million dollars; but anyway, they are: a mother who says to her daughter’s friend, “I like you; you eat so much”; a performance by Sonny Tufts, who has been coached too well to use his hands like Cary Grant but gets his pantomime over with a rather tricky sense of timing; and a meaningful bit by a Filipino doctor (Ted Hecht) who ruminates aloud while he operates.
September 27, 1943