Off-putting WWII romance reunites Clark Gable & Lana Turner as a pair of misaligned lovers (he can’t commit/she can’t walk away), news reporters with a shared past and any future complicated by her current/nicer beau, Gable’s ink-stained kid brother Robert Sterling. So, when Turner goes missing on assignment in SouthEast Asia, rival brothers team up to find her just as Pearl Harbor hits the news. You can see the possibilities, but the script can’t gloss over Gable’s shitty behavior, and Sterling can’t pull his weight against either star. It’s more uncomfortable than amusingly louche. Meanwhile, back in the real world, all but impossible to forget that Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, died in the middle of production when her plane went down after a War Bond rally. Gable finished the film (some dialogue toward the end cuts shockingly close to his personal tragedy), enlisted in the Army-Air Force, stayed off the screen four years, came back looking a decade older. Oh, the film was a big hit. Director Wesley Ruggles coasts on M-G-M’s even-paced/over-lit studio house style (Manhattan, Hanoi & Manila all look alike), but the film only sparks to life in an end-game series of war sorties when Bataan comes under attack. Second-unit work?* With tasty early credits for Van Johnson & Keenan Wynn as heroic types during the climax (such distinctive voices), action that's unexpectedly dark for the early war days when news from the front was unceasingly bad and Hollywood responded with lighthearted messaging.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *To Ruggles’ credit, a pick-up scene between Gable & Patricia Dane in a Manila hot spot really lands, showing the kind of breezy, easy sex Gable prefers to Turner’s smothering sincerity. Why didn’t someone pick up the ball and run with this?
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