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 Claudette Colbert stars in this story of American Army nurses who served in
World War II. The story follows Lt. Janet Davidson (Colbert) as she leads a
group of nurses in service in the Pacific. Their "friendships, hardships and
the love that keeps them going in the face continuous heartbreak" is
chronicled. They say this is based on a true story and that it
"successfully captures a remarkable time in history and brings it beautifully
to the screen." They also note that Paulette Goddard, Allan Scott, and Charles
Long were members of the cast and crew nominated for Academy Awards for their
efforts. 1943, 126 minutes, VHS
I originally bought this because Veronica Lake was in it. Having seen the film
noirs with Alan Ladd, I Married A Wtich , and Sullivan's Travels, the obsessive-compulsive freak in me needed to have this one as well. It
looked to me like this was going to be a war-time melodrama with a bunch of
flag-waving and I actually cringed when I saw that this baby was going to run
in excess of two hours. So it was with a bit of trepidation that I slammed it
into the VCR, hoping Veronica Lake and Claudette Colbert (who I liked a lot in It Happened One Night) could somehow make this bearable. Things got off to a wobbly start when I
viewed the trailer for this movie that's included on this video tape. The
preview seemed only to confirm my worst fears. Weepy chicks, propaganda and
there was Veronica Lake shouting at the top of her lungs that she was going to
kill as many "Japs" as possible (yes, I know that's not a proper term for the
Japanese people, but you should know that this film was made right after Pearl
Harbor, so they get called Japs an awful lot). I began to think that this was
going to be one of those movies that dated so badly it was actually funny (but
for over two hours?). The movie started up and everything seemed to go down
hill
as they started off by having a bunch of nurses deplaning from some war torn
spot. They have finally been evacuated from Corregidor or Bataan or some hot,
sweaty place where you probably sit around with the runs all day feeling like
someone's already run your bowels through with a bayonet. Claudette Colbert's
character Lieutenant Janet Davidson (Davie to her friends) is being hauled off
the plane on a stretcher. She's comatose and has been that way ever since
leaving Corregidor. One of the commanding officers has a letter from a dude
named John and he thinks he may be able to help her out of her catatonic state,
but he needs to know everything that happened while she was off playing
war-time nurse. Her fellow nurses then begin to narrate the story from the
beginning. Flashback time! My eyes fluttered back into my head as I pondered
the point of going through the whole stupid story. Where's the drama in that?
Of course there was this mysterious John...  In spite of all these misgivings I had, once the story of these nurses started
unfolding, I have to admit that I sat there engrossed and entertained for the
rest of the movie. The performances by Colbert , Lake, and Paulette Goddard
were heartfelt and in spite of the sometimes clunky dialogue they had to spout,
you remained convinced there was an everyday kind of toughness, mixed with a
common decency, that we Americans like to think we possess. Now, I ain't going
to lie to you. There were plenty of moments where this film lapsed into the
cheap kind of emotionalism you would have expected from a movie about nurses
sacrificing everything to help the war effort. You had medicine shortages,
nurses fainting from overwork, periodic bouts of doubt followed by patriotic
blather designed to boost sagging spirits, and even Veronica Lake playing a
martyred war-heroine. But those were just moments and they didn't overshadow
the overall humanity portrayed by these women. They may be in a war, but they
still had hearts and they did their best to reconcile the two. Now, we meet
some of our nurses shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. They're part of
a convoy going out to sea in the area and once the attack happens they're
forced to take on the wounded and care for them. Along the way, Sonny Tufts
shows up to put the moves on Paulette Goddard. She plays a nurse named Joan
O'Doul and Sonny plays an amiable goof named Kansas. See, his real name is
Weeping Willichek or something and he was a football star for some fake college
team called the Kansas Cyclones. Those of you who are old enough to remember
the olden days when the Big 12 was called the Big 8 know that it's the Kansas
Jayhawks and the Iowa State Cyclones and never the twain shall meet. Kansas
(the army guy, not the fake university) is familiar to some unfortunate
souls because he would later "star" in Cat-Women Of The Moon. I guess that's another career where you kind of ask, "geez, what happened to
you buddy?" This movie though, is not to be denied. Even Sonny Tufts' Kansas
endears himself to the viewer almost immediately with his lazy, hesitant way of
talking and his dogged pursuit of the reluctant O'Doul.  Once Davie's boat picks up some survivors from the attack at Pearl Harbor, we
are introduced to the last two final main characters. Veronica Lake comes
aboard as the ultra-surly Lt. Olivia D'Arcy (does this army have anything but
Lieutenants in it?). She walks around with her trademark, long blonde tresses
all wrapped up in a "I hate the world" bun, and her bottom lip sticks out a lot
to make sure we know she is pissed. She's a breath of fresh air since all the
other nurses are Polly Prissypants to each other and thus far have treated
being in the army as some type of slumber party where you can hook up with a
soldier if chit chat with the gals gets boring. No one wants to room with
D'Arcy because she is such an a-hole and she just sullenly drifts through her
duties until she reaches her breaking point! Ah, the breaking point! Always
entertaining when it happens. It all starts when one of the girls decides she
is going to borrow D'Arcy's locket without asking D'Arcy. This is akin to
deciding to try and thump Godzilla's little boy, Minya. You might be able to
do it initially, but sooner rather than later, you're going to be the victim
what a buddy of mine used to call some good old fashioned "Chicago Brawl."
(Admittedly, he had a lot of issues - he sat down at dinner once and announced
that he was going to go through the alphabet, and for every letter, he would
name a
person he hated, and by God if he didn't do it - and easily, too.) D'Arcy sulks
back into her room and proceeds to slap the crap out of O'Doul for messing with
her locket. Davie has to intervene, before this degenerates into one of those
cat-fights that we would just hate to see. I mean, there is no way anyone
would want to see a hair-pulling, wrestling match between Veronica Lake and
Paulette Goddard (who insisted on wearing a black nightgown to formal parties -
to keep morale up!). Thank goodness Claudette Colbert broke it up, before it
got really sweaty and serious. Davie decides to stay and bother D'Arcy about
what her freaking problem is. At some point in the film, we would learn that
D'Arcy was going to be married the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and that the
Japanese killed her intended in front of her and that his face was all shot
away. This was a very moving scene as Lake mustered some pretty good emotion
in delivering her speech. This is where she talks about wanting to kill as
many "Japs" as possible and you can see the hatred in her eyes as she says it.
You can't help but feel for her as she says that she loved him and that he was
all she had and now he's gone. When she says that, she isn't the tough,
vengeance-filled angel of death that she believes she is. She's just a person
who's had everything yanked away from her by this senseless attack and you can
just imagine that that scene worked probably better than any of the overt
propaganda scenes in the film, to stir our patriotism and keep us hating the
enemy (but really, when you go in and sneak attack us for no reason other than
that you're punks, do we need to be stirred up?). On the lighter side, we also
meet Lieutenant John Summers (I can't believe it! He's a lieutenant, too!).
He's
ably played by George Reeves and meets Davie when she is giving him a sponge
bath. Davie plays hard to get, but John is one of those guys that believes
there's not a lot of time for courting, what with all the sneak attacks.
Watching Davie eventually given in and admit that she loves him, even as she
tries to put him out of her mind (so she won't be as destroyed as D'Arcy if he
is killed - as is a distinct possibility) is satisfying since John is as decent
in
his own way as Kansas is.  The rest of the movie details the efforts of these nurses to give assistance to
the wounded in the Pacific theatre (most notably in Bataan and Corregidor).
Life quickly becomes a series of moving from field hospital to field hospital
as they try to stay a step ahead of the furious attacks of the Japanese. In
fact, the rest of the movie presents us as getting our ass beat up and down by
them. The Japanese have driven MacArthur from the Philippines and the nurses
gather around the radio hoping to get some positive word. All they get are
Japanese propaganda and commercials advertising delicious food that they don't
have. Shortages of everything is a way of life for them now, from
food and medicine to reliable information about when relief and new supplies
would come in. Through it all, these nurses try to maintain a strong front, a
difficult task with the incessant shelling and the worry they have about their
soldier-boyfriends. Like all wars, this one has its casualties. Most dramatic
(maybe melodramatic?) of them is Veronica Lake's character. Once the nurses
get to some hospital they're supposed to working at, she asks if there are any
Japanese wounded there (uh-oh). Then she volunteers to go work in that ward.
That's a bit like Star Jones volunteering to guard the fridge on the set of The View (I only watch it to see what Meredith is wearing). So, Lt. D'Arcy has got
this "Angel of Death" gimmick working and when Davie finds out, she's like,
"aw, hellll no" and hauls her nurse butt over to the Japanese ward. D'Arcy is
there and of course has wussed out on her plan to administer her own brand of
first-aid, which consists of a pillow over the face punctuated by her liberal
use of racial slurs. She tells Davie that she couldn't do it. Apparently,
D'Arcy is reformed, though this conversion seemed pretty fast for someone so
damaged by what has happened to her. Just how damaged she still remains is
made clear when the nurses find themselves pinned down by the Japanese as they
attempt to evacuate one of the hospitals they've been working at. I should
note that O'Doul caused all this to happen when she delayed everyone's
departure so that she could make sure she brought her black nightgown along.
I've known a couple of dudes that probably would've taken the same risk to get
their hands on some lingerie. Well, they're being strafed or something and
D'Arcy takes a grenade and walks out to meet the Japanese. This patently
stupid stunt is treated with almost religious reverence, as Lake now has this
blank look on her face and her brilliant blonde locks are finally out of that
infernal bun for the first time in the entire show. She pulls the pin and
hides the explosive in her coat and walks out, drawing a bunch of Japanese
around her. Then the grenade, she, and the enemy soldiers vanish in a smokey
explosion. Well, that sounds pretty much like what she probably thought she
was signing up for when she joined the Red Cross. After this, there's more bombings, evacuations, nurses having breakdowns, and
John and Davie find time to get married in between all this drama. It is a
simple ceremony, but touching and they spend their honeymoon in a foxhole
before John has to leave on a secret mission to find medicine and Davie has to
be evacuated to Australia. When it's time for Davie to leave, she faints dead
away as her strength finally gives way, not because of the Japanese onslaught,
but because of her worry over John whom she has not heard from for a week or
two (he's on a secret mission for crying out loud!). The end of the film shows
her reviving as this officer reads a letter from John telling her that he is
okay and to wait for him on his farm and that he'll be eventually coming home.
For some reason I really enjoyed this movie. I was thinking about what the
difference was between this and the similarly themed Bataan death march that
was Pearl Harbor. There you had the story (more or less) of two pilots and the nurse they both
wanted to lay in between bombings and such. It goes without saying that the
movie was about as awful as summer blockbusters get (and we usually give them
lots of latitude to begin with). But one would think that a movie made 60
years after the events depicted would allow for some studied reflection and
perspective. Instead, you watch So Proudly We Hail, and you marvel at how much more effective a film it is, even though it was
made
during the war, and probably during a phase of it where the U.S. of A wasn't
exactly setting the world on fire in the Pacific. It may be precisely for that
reason that this film was more effective. Everyone involved was probably
affected by those real life events, with friends at war or already being
shipped home in body bags. With Ben Affleck and company, you get a bunch of
spoiled kids playing dress up and modeling leather jackets that you could
probably
purchase in the mall after the movie if you were so inclined. Hail successfully focused on the people and their everyday struggles in that
situation. These people are guarded with their emotions and aren't quick to
latch on to anything in a sailor suit, because they know the reality of war:
people die and the survivors ache ever after. Lake's character represents
that, and it is precisely because she has lost everything of value to her that
she
is eager to blow up as many enemy as she can. Without her true love, her life
is meaningless, and she hasn't changed her mind at all about getting revenge on
the Japanese, only her methods. Who wants to be hurt so irrevocably? Not
Colbert or Goddard's character. But life does go on and though they are at war
and have to do and see awful things, they are still human. And humans want
love and probably against their better judgment they allow themselves to feel
for these soldiers, John and Kansas. They aren't supermen, rushing off to
single-handedly beat back the Japanese attack like Affleck and whoever his male
model friend were. They don't go off to Britain so they can get in some early
combat action, and there is none of these I was lost at sea, now I'm back, but
my girl's been humping my friend and is preggers, but we save each other a few
times and he dies saving me and I'm more than happy to be with her and raise
your kid stuff that permeated Peal Harbor like the sick smell
of that the lard they used as a butter substitute on the popcorn that gave me
the runs for two days. I mean, was this World War II or General Hospital? John and Kansas grow just as the nurses do, from the fresh faced Joes that
arrived on the boat back at the end of 1941 to the grizzled grunts they became
months later, their resolve to fight still as strong as their feelings for
O'Doul and Davie. There's no bragging or big speeches from them, just a
resoluteness that they are doing what's right and when Kansas tells O'Doul
that he won't retreat, even if ordered to do so, it's not bravado, it's the
same stubbornness and determination that made him a football star in college and
that made him keep pursing O'Doul, even as she kept pushing him away. The
movie is obviously a propaganda piece and there are moments you want to cringe
at, from the obvious speeches that periodically crop up about what were
fighting for to the time when one of the characters compared Tojo to a monkey.
But that doesn't detract from the movie all that much. The film succeeds in my
estimation because you care what happens to the characters, you're hoping that
that letter from is telling Davie that he's okay and will be home, you're
hoping that Kansas is smart enough not to get his country-boy ass shot off
before he can settle down with O'Doul, and you're hoping that D'Arcy has
finally found piece now that's wasted a platoon of Japanese soldiers. After
watching this movie, I was ready to sign up to be an army nurse! (Wait a
second... that's not right.)
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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