“A Guy Named Joe” is a film-malted that is mostly cloying, sometimes quite amusing, and so rich and plentiful in certain Hollywood attitudes that it is also educational. The picture features Spencer Tracy as Joe and Irene Dunne as Dorinda Durston, in a story about a flier who is killed and returns to earth in almost the same state he left it, to help student fliers learn to fly. He can “get through to them” but they can’t see or hear him. Hollywood has been fighting a tremendous battle with the problem of death in the war and this is the most elaborate statement of its conclusions on the subject.
Immediately after Joe dies in a bombing dive on a German aircraft-carrier, he is seen, jovial and as good as new, walking and whistling his way across the same expanse of clouds that another transcendental wonder named Joe walked across in “Here Comes Mr. Jordan.” He meets an old buddy who was killed in a bombing raid over Brest, and the two of them walk on to God’s headquarters. This is an airfield, and God is a World War I ace, or Lionel Barrymore, who has given this type of advice often on earth but never before in heaven. He shows Joe that the freedom he feels when he flies high in the clouds alone as an airman is the same kind of freedom as is being fought for on earth—“the freedom of men to breathe the very air they fly in.” He tells him that he will pay his debt to the past by teaching young fliers, and Joe proceeds to pay his debt for the rest of the picture, as a kind of spiritual alter ego to a young flier named Pete and his girl, who used to be Joe’s girl, Dorinda (Dorinda is a girl who at various times is called “pretty as a new pair of yellow shoes, pretty as a P-38, pretty as a new propellor, pretty as a dream and the prettiest girl in the world”). The moral to draw from this movie—besides the one that life after death is, if possible, a narrower state than the life before death shown in Hollywood movies—is that death is so like what comes before it that it shouldn’t offer any problems to Americans. You may be bored with it if you’re not a flier, or even if you are, because it is taken up completely with good works (“there is plenty of work up here,” says one contented messenger), but it is not one—the movie insists—that will be a drastic change for you. And so the movies take yet another load off the mind of mankind.
This picture is also an example of the prime attitude of Hollywood toward war films: that they are going to try to keep public morale up first (in the hearty slap-on-the-back way), and second, make movies. “A Guy Named Joe” is literally a handbook of do’s and don’t’s for airmen, and for their relatives when the airmen die, which is given a somewhat more human slant than most handbooks by wisecracking, fantasy, warmth. The essential imperfection of this and other textbook movies is that of forcing the audience to accept more coincidence, unbelievable speech-making and success-story progress than it likes to take in a picture standing for life. But the advice will do you no harm and I am going to give you as much of it as I can remember: don’t tighten up at the controls, have hero hunger or lone-wolf it; think for yourself; don’t take chances; while you’re up in the clouds, feel what it is like to be up there; go out with girls, or at least eat and dance with them; and pay attention to your instincts, sixth-sense—which, I take it, is your spiritual helper, Mr. Tracy, who is, never doubt, always there, trying to get in to you.
This movie is also full of a hero type who is the more average, less eccentric and less popular relation to the tall, shy cowboy-like hero and the shorter, tough men who operate in the underworld. Films like this refer to him warmly as a guy, a lug, or old boy, name him Joe, Pete, Dan or Bill, and put him into less exotic, more pedestrian jobs than the ones that Cooper and Bogart are put into. In this job he progresses, by hard, honest, uncomplaining work, from the lowest rank to the highest, even taking him, as this picture does, to Wing Commander God in heaven. He is not, for a change, anti-talk. His line, like his face, is a good, unvarnished, pliable one, that says for a name like Sanderson “Sanuhson” out of a mouth that is generally used as though full of tobacco juice. He is the movie ideal of the family man, beyond sin, but he is apt to spend the picture, as Gable did in “It Happened One Night,” treating and teasing his girl as if she were a dumb little child. His life with his girl is usually, besides a continual stream of banter, cute. This hero’s existence is consciously intended to be a more rounded one, and his personality capable of responding with greater elasticity to that existence than were the heroes personified by Cooper or Bogart, but, unlike them, he is usually sugared to death.
There is a speech at the end of “A Guy Named Joe” that is the finest description of this kind of film. Part of it runs, “Everything’s going to be prettier, you’re not to have any more bad dreams, you’re going to have all the things people have, your life is going to be living, laughing, fighting and loving. . . .”
January 17, 1944