MEN MUST FIGHT (1933)

Of the handful of films Diana Wynyard made in a brief, but intense Hollywood period (‘32 to ‘34, mostly ‘prestige’ productions: RASPUTIN AND THE EMPRESS; CAVALCADE; REUNION IN VIENNA), this was the outlier. A weirdly prescient mother-love/war story predicting World War in 1940, it plays like the ‘three-hankie’ novel H.G. Wells never wrote. Eye-popping politics meets eyeball rolling dramatics, but it does hold your interest. In a prologue, WWI flier Robert Young is killed on a first run, but not before impregnating nurse Wynyard. Enter older, also-ran suitor Lewis Stone, happy to save Wynyard from disgrace and play father to a dead man’s son. Jumping ahead two decades, Stone is now Secretary of War, trying to stop a new world conflict; wife Wynyard a socially prominent leader of the Pacifist Mothers Society; grown son Phillips Holmes (unaware of his true parentage) is recently engaged and proudly anti-war. But when Stone’s treaty collapses, America is attacked by air and war declared. Parental face-off; boy’s fiancée ashamed of marrying a defeatist, Holmes made aware of his true father . . . everyone conflicted as heck. If only the script, along with occasional film director Edgar Selwyn were up to the task.* Undersung lenser George Folsey helps with some ravishing portraits, and a bombing run on the city is a miniature model pip. Otherwise, dead in the water; with a question mark end that tries to have things both ways.

DOUBLE-BILL: Similar maternal concern over a son going off to war comes up for Irene Dunne in THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER/’44 and Olivia de Havilland on TO EACH HER OWN/’46.

ATTENTION MJUST BE PAID: *Largely a man of the theater, Lewis Selwyn holds a footnote in film history from his partnership with a certain Samuel Goldfish. Combining Goldfish to Selwyn to form The Goldwyn Company, they signed an agreement that kept either party from adopting the company name as their own. Naturally, Samuel Goldfish broke the contract and legally became Samuel Goldwyn. (Though everyone who knew him thought he took the wrong ‘halves’ and should have become Samuel Selfish.)