THE closest movie equivalents to having a knife slowly turned in a wound for two hours are “Tender Comrade” and “The Story of Dr. Wassell.” The latter is Cecil B. DeMille’s manner of showing the early war heroism in which a Naval Reserve doctor maneuvered eight stretcher-confined American sailor casualties through the Javanese jungle to safety while the Japs were hot on their heels. The picture is no doubt as factual as Dr. Wassell says it is, but any fact that is translated into film by de Mille looks like his most ancient movie affectation, and in this case his worst. Dr. Wassell’s sailor wards carry on like rowdy prep-school boys on a tear and look silly enough to make anyone think twice before rescuing them. Their hospital in the jungle, which looks like the spick and span and pretty construction of a Frank Lloyd Wright disciple in the midst of a great head of romaine, is jammed with cute nurses—especially Javanese kewpie-dolls, who leave their nurse’s uniforms traditionally unbuttoned at the top, and strip them off every third reel as a DeMille premium. In and out of the playful grappling that goes on between the nurses and the sailor-lads is a comic who does all kinds of funny things like getting hit on the head with a coconut or feigning sickness so the nurse will hold his hand. Dr. Wassell is played by Gary Cooper, who has a manner of blinking and gulping shyly and talking about hogs.
According to the ancient DeMille formula, there must always be several intertwining love triangles which untwine through the movie in the simplest beginning-middle-end way possible, no matter what the forces around them. Thus while the heaviest air raid of the picture is going on, with the sailors being jolted and knocked about their hospital ward, it is typical that one of the men should be telling the others the romantic story of how Dr. Wassell found the bug and the girl he was looking for in China before the war. And when the picture moves into the home stretch with about five corners of two triangles still unaccounted for, four of them show up on the same ship headed out of Java for Australia and the other one is heard over the ship’s radio. Something else is finished even after the picture ends, when it is announced that the producers have just heard that “Hoppy is alive and a prisoner of the Japs.”
“Tender Comrade” is a cloying tribute to a kind of soldier’s wife whose cruel, selfish and over-indulgent love and concept of marriage should cure a lot of soldier-home-sickness. It presents one supreme example of this type of spouse, played with unfortunate she-tiger conviction by Ginger Rogers. She is a possessive, dominating shrew, who goes up in sparks when her husband forsakes her to read a magazine or dance with another woman or do some overtime at the office. Her favorite expression is, “Men are such fools,” and her treatment of the one she is smothering (Robert Ryan) is that of a cocksure, contemptuous mother toward her baby. The author of the picture (Dalton Trumbo) and its producers (David Hempstead and Edward Dmytryk) feel that all these attitudes are charming and cute and play them that way. At the end of the picture when Miss Rogers hears that her husband has been killed, she picks up his photograph in one hand, her just-born child in the other, and goes to work on him: “Remember him, Son, remember him as long as you live. Never forget him, little guy. . . . He only bought you the best world a guy ever had, and if you dare let anyone tell you different. . . .”
Part of the picture consists of an account of this love-nest, and the rest of it of Miss Rogers’ life with three other soldiers’ wives, who share a house while their husbands are away fighting. Theirs is the ideal wartime behavior for wives: knitting, gushing over their letters and pictures, and persecuting one of their members who now and then threatens to go to a night club and is somewhat unenthusiastic about rationing. At the end of the picture one of the husbands has the misfortune to return home on a furlough, and he is devoured before your eyes, as you expected. The value that the producers place on drooling, faithful love is incredible. It excuses the embarrassing idiocy of one member, the bitchiness of three of them and the beaming, pompous satisfaction with which they all sit around like so many hens on eggs.
“The White Cliffs of Dover” is articulated with enough movie sensibility (Clarence Brown’s) to raise it out of the horror category of “Tender Comrade” and “Dr. Wassell,” but it is just about the dullest picture on record. It is an old shawl of a movie in praise of England and her people, who it feels are an extremely fine people but on the reserved, mild, snailish side. This leads to just about the most pooped-out job I have ever seen.
June 26, 1944