In 1943, as a freelancer cutting multi-picture deals, Loretta realized that, without a home base, she would be leading a nomadic existence, while her peers, ensconced at their own studios, would be starring in more prestigious films: MGM’s Greer Garson, a recent Academy Award winner for Mrs. Miniver (1942), in Madame Curie (1943), which brought her an Oscar nomination; Warner’s Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance and Watch on the Rhine (1943); Fox’s Gene Tierney in Heaven Can Wait (1943); and Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette (1943). The last was a role that Loretta could have played, as if Bernadette had already been beatified, awaiting canonization. Loretta may have been six years older than Jones, but at thirty, she looked just as youthful as Jones did at twenty-four.
Loretta knew that the parts she was offered were not choice; freelancing may have brought independence, but not necessarily the kind that leads to Oscars or Oscar nominations. Loretta surprised Hollywood when she won an Oscar for The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), a Samuel Goldwyn production (she was not Goldwyn’s first choice). A final nomination, ironically, came for a picture that she made upon her return to Fox after a ten-year absence, Come to the Stable (1949).
When Loretta committed to four pictures at Paramount, she was not exactly a stranger on the lot. She had been there a decade earlier in The Crusades. But this was a different Paramount, headed by Buddy De Sylva, who did not have any new female dramatic stars. Claudette Colbert had been with Paramount since 1929; other actresses, such as Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake, were primarily decorative. The Paramount contract player in the ascendant was a male: Alan Ladd, whose portrayal of the cold-blooded Raven in This Gun for Hire (1941) heralded the arrival of a star, but one whose career needed nurturing so that he would avoid the pitfalls of stereotyping. Instead, Paramount capitalized on Ladd’s banked anger, knowing that audiences sensed it was only a matter of time before the lid popped.
With America’s entry into World War II, a new type of character became popular: the apolitical American, usually male, who undergoes a transformation from detachment to commitment—and, in some cases, commitment with a vengeance. The classic type is the “I stick my neck out for no man” Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca (1942) who, once he comes over to the other side, sticks his neck out for everyone, going so far as to join the Free French at the end of the film. That same year, Paramount released Lucky Jordan, in which Alan Ladd became a son of Uncle Sam after an elderly woman (memorably played by Mabel Paige), who posed as his mother to prevent his being drafted, was brutalized by Nazi thugs. That does it: “Nazi is another way to spell cockroach,” he declares, becoming, as existentialists would say, engagé.
In China (1943), the first of Loretta’s four Paramount films, Ladd was cast opposite her as a similar type: an employee of a petroleum export company, one of whose clients is Japan. The time is shortly before Pearl Harbor; the place is China, where anti-Japanese sentiment is strong after Japan’s ruthless attempts to reduce China to a satellite. Although Loretta had top billing, Ladd was the real star. Loretta knew that the plot did not require a fashionable wardrobe, even though the costume designer was the legendary Edith Head. Loretta played Carolyn Grant, an American teacher determined to bring her female students to their university, using her powers of persuasion to get Ladd to transport them. Throughout the film, there are veiled references to Nanking, which the Japanese invaded in 1937, precipitating what is now called “The Rape of Nanking,” during which 20,000 women were sexually assaulted within a month. The specter of rape hovers over the film, and when it happens, even though off-screen, it is the single unforgettable scene in a movie that is part flag-waver, part tribute to our Chinese allies and their leader, General Chiang Kai-shek.
When one of the students decides to return to her parents’ village, Loretta prevails upon Ladd to bring her back. In an earlier scene, the student has just arrived when a Japanese motorcade pulls up. Soldiers disembark and kill the parents. As the soldiers eye the student, one of them grins malevolently, as the glare of the sun blinds him to the young woman’s premature sense of shame when she realizes the inevitable. In 1943, it was impossible to show a female being gang raped; forty-five years later, she could be seen to be raped, even on a pool table (The Accused [1988]). In China, the rape is still in progress when Ladd and Loretta arrive. Director John Farrow composed the shot in such a way that when the two enter the house, we can see clear across the frame to the bedroom. The door is ajar, and the girl is writhing on the bed in agony. Three soldiers emerge; once they see Ladd with his machine gun, they try to be conciliatory. At that moment, Loretta rushes into the bedroom, stripping off her raincoat and throwing it over the student. Ladd, now thoroughly committed, kills the soldiers, referring to them as “flies in a manure heap.”
The student’s death from the ordeal provides Loretta with an opportunity to give a moving reading of the Twenty-Third Psalm. At the end of the film, Ladd and some Chinese partisans prepare to dynamite a ravine, causing an avalanche to block the passage of a Japanese convoy. To buy time, Ladd makes small talk with one of the soldiers, who spouts the familiar expository line to explain his command of English: “I have studied in your country.” When the soldier boasts that Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor, Ladd launches into a speech about freedom; the solder, incensed, shoots him, and the rocks come tumbling down. Loretta did what she could with the role, which was far from a stretch. The script implied that her character would awaken Ladd’s dormant conscience, but it was the rape that did so. He was once again “Lucky Jordan,” the avenger of women who suffered at the hands of America’s enemies. High fashion was also out of the question, since the script required Carolyn to wear the same outfit for the entire film. At least Loretta had the luxury of starting at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 6:00 p.m.
China was one of Loretta’s two contributions to the war effort at a time when Hollywood’s leading ladies were expected to appear in films designed to convince audiences that America would not fall victim to the Axis. Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake, and Paulette Goddard were Red Cross nurses on Bataan in Paramount’s So Proudly We Hail (1943). Greer Garson played a British wife and mother who encounters a Nazi in her garden in Mrs. Miniver. Bette Davis was the wife of a freedom fighter in Watch on the Rhine (1943). Gene Tierney played a Eurasian teacher in Fox’s China Girl (1942). Ginger Rogers kept the home fires burning while her husband, never to return, was at war in RKO’s Tender Comrade (1943). Ann Sheridan was a Norwegian resistance fighter in Warner’s Edge of Darkness (1943). Joan Crawford outwitted the Nazis in MGM’s Reunion in France (1942) and engaged in espionage in MGM’s Above Suspicion (1943). Loretta was in good company, and in a reasonably good film—although not as memorable as So Proudly We Hail, which had greater appeal. The problem was that she was upstaged by Ladd, Paramount’s golden boy, who was being groomed for stardom that was to prove short-lived. Loretta, on the other hand, was not a Paramount regular; she encamped at whatever studio offered her the better deal. Ladd was not quite ready to freelance.
In 1943, Loretta also demonstrated her patriotism by traveling to the East Coast for a bond drive. When she returned to Los Angeles, she was welcomed by the Monterey Park Girls Drum and Bugle Corps and given a military escort to Pershing Square, where she was so persuasive that a man bought $1,500 worth of war savings bonds from her. Earlier that year, she flew to Washington to celebrate President Roosevelt’s birthday and visit her husband, who was then a lieutenant colonel stationed in D.C. Again, she was formally greeted on her return, this time by two Chinese children who presented her with a bouquet of gladioli. Unlike Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich, Martha Raye, and Frances Langford, Loretta did not travel to Western Europe or the Pacific to entertain the GIs; nor was she a regular at the Hollywood Canteen like Bette Davis. Still, she did her part—and of course, a little publicity did not hurt. Loretta was never shy about speaking in public, particularly if it was for a good cause and meant press coverage.
Loretta owed Universal a second picture, which turned out to be another Walter Wanger production. Wanger was then based at Universal, which offered him $2,500 a week and creative control, except for the choice of director and cast—and the right of final cut, which the studio reserved for itself. One of the reasons Wanger became a semi-independent producer was his desire to build up his own stock company, so that he would not necessarily be saddled with a studio’s contract players. That plan did not always work out. When Wanger arrived at Universal in 1941, he discovered that he had to draw, for the most part, on the studio’s regulars: e.g., Jon Hall, Maria Montez, Lois Collier, June Vincent, Evelyn Ankers, Anne Gwynne, Yvonne De Carlo, and David Bruce—all of whom were familiar to B movie aficionados. Wanger had no illusions about the quality of the Universal product: horror films, Abbott and Costello comedies, Deanna Durbin musicals, Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan teenage romps, and sand and sex adventures. But he was shrewd enough to know that, with the advent of World War II, a producer could not go wrong with flag-wavers. Since Wanger sensed that the army, navy, marines, and air force would receive enough exposure on the screen, he convinced Universal to buy the script and the footage that had already been shot for Eagle Squadron, a tribute to the American pilots who offered their services to the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Blitz, after United Artists passed on the project. At the same time that Wanger was working on Eagle Squadron (1942), he was making the hokey but entertaining Arabian Nights (1942), with Universal’s own Jon Hall, Maria Montez, Turhan Bey, and Sabu.
Eagle Squadron was a respectable film, but We’ve Never Been Licked (1943) was one of the most blatantly anti-Japanese movies of the decade. The film portrays Japanese students at Texas A&M who hope to learn how they can “apply the best of American civilization” to their country—while at the same time justifying Japan’s conquest of China in animal imagery: “Sometimes, it is necessary to choke the dog to give it medicine for the dog’s own good.”
Wanger’s fourth Universal film was slightly better, but not enough to make it eligible for inclusion among the great World War II films such as Mrs. Miniver, Bataan, So Proudly We Hail, They Were Expendable, and Pride of the Marines. Wanger had found an even less familiar subject than Americans in the RAF: the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), founded in 1942 and a year later combined with the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) to form the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPS). After various title changes, including “When Ladies Fly,” the film became Ladies Courageous (1944). Wanger did not have to be reminded that women made up more than half of the movie going population during World War II. Nor did Hollywood, releasing such films as Cry Havoc and So Proudly We Hail (both 1943), which dramatized the plight of the nurses abandoned on Bataan. Home front fare like The Sullivans (1944), in which the mother of five sons who enlisted in the Navy is informed that all are dead, and Since You Went Away (1944), in which a wife and mother waits for news about her missing husband, as countless women did at the time, also appeared on movie screens.
For Ladies Courageous to succeed, Wanger needed a star. Loretta was never a real Wanger actress, like Joan Bennett and Susan Hayward. She was rather like a passenger on a boat that sailed from port to port. But Wanger had to keep the film afloat, and Loretta had a commitment to Universal. She may have balked at the supporting cast that included Universal stalwarts such as David Bruce, Anne Gwynne, Lois Collier, June Vincent and Evelyn Ankers, all of whom acquitted themselves well. Not quite as prestigious as Loretta was Geraldine Fitzgerald, a fine actress on loan from Warner Bros. Loretta and Geraldine played sisters who ran a California school for training pilots—which itself may have proved a revelation to 1944 audiences. Unlike The Lady From Cheyenne, which opened at New York’s Roxy, “the cathedral of movie palaces,” Ladies Courageous was booked into the Criterion, a less prestigious venue. The New York Times (16 March 1944) was highly critical of the film, not on aesthetic grounds, but for its depiction of the WAFS, implying that Wanger, who had served in the Signal Corps in World War I, should have known better than to make a movie about the WAFS that was just a melodrama involving infidelity, suicide, enlistment for publicity purposes, reckless endangerment, and an MIA husband. The Times critic seemed to want a documentary rather than a feature film. If such a documentary were ever made, it would not have been made by Wanger, who knew that it would only be shown in newsreel theaters, such as the one that used to be located in Grand Central Station.
If Hollywood was able to grind out so many war-related films in the 1940s, it was partially because screenwriters had concocted a workable formula: Take an event, a battle, or a branch of the armed services and weave a plot around it. In Ladies Courageous, based on a novel by Virginia Spencer Cowles, the same principle was applied to the WAFS. The movie did not downplay the tension between the male and female pilots (the latter originally intended merely to ferry planes to military bases, freeing the men for combat). Although the men are clearly sexist and sneer at the “lady pilots,” the WAFS are not exactly a community of saints. Among them is a wife (Lois Collier), who commits suicide by crashing her plane because her philandering husband has taken up with another WAF (Diana Barrymore), and a reckless celebrity (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who only enlists for publicity and is so irresponsible that she almost costs another WAF her life. Loretta is the exception: a faithful wife with an MIA husband. Will he return for the fade out? He does, the movie ends, and Ladies Courageous goes into a tailspin, landing in the sea of forgotten films.
In case feminists wondered whether Wanger could have used the same plot points for a movie about male pilots, for the most part, he—or anyone—could have. Only suicide posed a problem, although at the end of Bombardier (1943), Randolph Scott sacrifices himself so that Colonel Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo would succeed. Generally, the suicides in World War II films were women. Veronica Lake, as a Red Cross nurse in So Proudly We Hail, conceals a grenade in her shirt, raises her hands as a sign of surrender, and blows herself up—along with the Japanese soldiers encircling her, thus enabling the other nurses to escape the proverbial fate worse than death. Rosalind Russell, as an Amelia Earhart type pilot, runs out of fuel in Flight for Freedom (1942) and chooses to remain airborne, knowing that her plane will eventually plunge into the Pacific—but better a watery grave than landing on a Japanese-held island where an unknown fate awaits her.
A male version of Ladies Courageous would have been atypical and unpopular. Men in the 1940s combat film could be competitive, particularly in the “two men-in-love-with-the-same-woman” movie (Thunder Birds [1942], Bombardier [1943], They Were Expendable [1945]), but the loser never resorted to suicide. Men have their fears (Thunder Birds) and could be prickly, pugnacious, and smart-alecky (Action in the North Atlantic, Air Force [both 1943]), but not reckless to the point of endangering another GI’s life. According to Hollywood, men apparently bond better than women (Wake Island [1942], Corregidor [1943]); divergent opinions (Bombardier) and generational conflicts (Destroyer [1943]) exist but are eventually resolved. Hollywood’s GIs were uncommonly religious (Destination Tokyo and Guadalcanal Diary [both 1943]). This is the image of the fighting man that the films of the war years have bequeathed to subsequent generations. World War II veterans would know better, but Hollywood’s version was meant for mass consumption.
The Ladies Courageous plot points, sans suicide, could have been recycled for a similar screenplay about men, except that no studio would have produced it. Any studio would have realized that such a film could never be shown on army bases, and that women would have wondered how America could ever win the war if such men were representative of our armed forces. Ladies Courageous at least acknowledged that there were women’s divisions other than the well-known WACS and the WAVES, and moviegoers, who knew nothing about the WAFS, at least learned the acronym. But Loretta’s fans just wanted a movie with enough suspense to justify the price of admission. That they received, but no upgrades.