JackFavell wrote:That all makes sense to me, Moira, I can almost see a little of Bill Robinson in Kelly, it doesn't hurt that the two men are very much alike physically.
Though I always have the impression that Robinson was quite a bit taller than Gene.
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As mentioned earlier in this thread,
So Proudly We Hail (1943), was aired last night as part of the women in war theme being explored with Cher and Robert Osborne on Friday night. I hadn't seen it in some time, but found that the real pleasure I took in the movie derived from the secondary players in this movie.
I like the very talented
Claudette Colbert a good deal and
Paulette Goddard can be a charming minx, but the romances both were saddled with in this movie dragged a bit for me, though it's possible the Production Code may have been a factor. I kept thinking, if anything, these nurses on board that ship in the Pacific might be pretty leery of feeling a deep emotion for guys they barely knew. I suspect that a few moments of shared intimacy might have been on the agenda for some of them, though fear of losing someone and getting hurt would have complicated things in the real world--but hey, who watches movies for realism? Not me. The formulaic need to fall in love under wartime circumstances, the
George Reeves and
Sonny Tufts' rather hollow characters, and the fact that both leading ladies sported beautifully buffed, perfect glistening manicures on Corregidor kind of bothered me. But how nice that there were evidently no bugs in the jungle, though dysentery and malaria were mentioned.
SPOILER ALERT
Good thing that the movie had such a good
Veronica Lake performance as the edgy, bitter young nurse determined to get revenge on the Japanese after the Pearl Harbor attack killed her fiance. This and her truncated role as an emotionally fragile woman in
Slattery's Hurricane (1949) make me think that she might have been capable of more than being a stylish foil for
Alan Ladd or a kittenish sorceress in Rene Clair's
I Married a Witch (1942)--though didn't she look awfully glamorous as she approached the Japanese with a grenade inside her coveralls?
Veronica Lake
While she didn't have a character with too many lines to play, the serenely beautiful
Barbara Britton as Rosemary, the young nurse who meets her fate with
Ted Hecht (the philosophical Filipino surgeon), really was lovely, though I suspect that the screenwriters wrestled with the idea of having the impressionable nurse and appealing doctor strike romantic sparks, despite the fear of miscegenation at the time.
Britton would be more than merely pretty again in Borzage's 1944 film,
Till We Meet Again. I felt that her doomed innocence was foreshadowed early on in "So Proudly..." by the effectively played parting scene given depth by her mother's (
Elsa Janssen) sorrowful realism as she sent her daughter off to be a nurse.
Barbara Britton
It was also a pleasure to see character actresses
Dorothy Adams and
Ann Doran given strong parts to play for once.
Ann Doran's remarks about what she had witnessed in Nanking being especially haunting as she refused to ignore hard realities to come. She made me tear up when she slipped a letter to her mother to one of the nurses being evacuated.
Ann Doran facing facts (and expressing genuine fear).
I bet
Dorothy Adams (above) was
really relieved to play someone other than a nervous maid for once!
After seeing this movie, I wanted to know what happened to the 77 real nurses who were left behind on Corregidor and found a couple of interesting links, one of which indicates that the last surviving woman of this siege and captivity,
Mildred Dalton Manning, died less than one month ago at the age of 98.
The real angels of Corregidor being liberated in 1945.
Mildred Dalton Manning Obituary
The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor: 70 Years Later
WWII Museum Info on Angels of Bataan
We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman (a book about the real life nurses based on interviews with survivors)