No longer a Warner Brothers Young-Man-In-A Hurry, but now M-G-M producer/director corporate animal, Mervyn LeRoy could still make something out of congenial material. Stately hooey like RANDOM HARVEST/’42 and MADAME CURIE/’43, so ‘of-a-piece,’ not even Greer Garson able to knock them off track. And here, in this big WWII epic, released soon after D-Day, he proves just the man for the job . . . on about half the film. Trouble is, what’s good and what’s bad come tumbling our way higgledy-piggledy, making it all but impossible to mentally sort out the wheat from the chaff. Generally though, things work best in the first half as Spencer Tracy’s Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle preps an all but logistically impossible surprise raid on Tokyo amid post Pearl Harbor hysteria & defeatism. Under Dalton Trumbo’s script, this comes across as a bit corny (no surprise), but well structured and involving. (If only those Texas Fly Boys would stop singing.) Much of the cast (Van Johnson, Don DeFore, Stephen McNally, Phyllis Thaxter* - a depressingly twinkly film debut after Robert Sherwood on B’way with The Lunts, Montgomery Clift, Sydney Greenstreet), all as fully corporate & efficient as LeRoy, but with useful irritants like Robert Walker & Robert Mitchum showing a different way to do things. (Tracy only around fitfully for dour background & briefings.) The actual raid, with very cleverly handled effects for the period, accurately zips by not much past the halfway mark, while the rest of the film (a long rescue) proves less conducive to LeRoy’s amusement. Lots of failed soundstage exterior sets and unconvincing cyclorama background paintings. Plus a truly appalling symbolic moment when an amputation is represented in a dream sequence with a large tree getting sawed in the background. Yikes! Long enough for a prestige release (the film could easily lose half an hour), it certainly worked for audiences at the time, and to some extent still does.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Thaxter, rarely used properly in film, seen at her best as John Garfield’s wife in THE BREAKING POINT/’50, exhibiting a healthy sex drive in Michael Curtiz’s fine Hemingway adaptation. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-breaking-point-1950.html
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Could Van Johnson’s post-crash facial scars after downing his plane in the movie be the real thing, leftover from a near fatal motorbike accident he had in the middle of shooting A GUY NAMED JOE/’43? Usually covered by thick makeup, it now would have come in handy.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: As usual, front-line M-G-M composer Herbert Stothart relies as much as possible on existing music for his cues. And while he typically raids the Classical Music closet, here he’s managed to fold in a famous riff from the Rodgers & Hammerstein 1943 musical sensation OKLAHOMA! The title track! It’s the music that goes along with ‘When the wind comes right behind the rain.'
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