From a foxhole located in the Philippines, Clydes Movie Palace presents: So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

Sometimes I wonder how a film such as So Proudly We Hail (1943) ever made it into the theaters. It stars not just one legendary female lead but three of them: Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake. I always say if you're going to give a dance, bring on the triple threat.

Getting these actresses in the same movies couldn't have been easy. Big stars, male or female have egos; sometimes, those egos can get in the way.

I've heard and read different stories about whether they got along. Some say that Claudette and Paulette feuded, and in this clip by Robert Osborne, Lake indicated none of them could get along with Colbert. Still, costar George Reeves said that Lake caused all the problems on the set. George was a man, though, so women will probably retort, "What did he know?"

How often have we forgotten women's role in World War II? Sometimes we must be reminded that it wasn't the men in the trenches.

So Proudly We Hail Opens at the movie's end, telling its story as a flashback. It must have been a shock to moviegoers of the 40's to see these three women disembarking from a plane looking anything but glamorous. They had all been to hell and back, which is emphasized even more when Lt. Janet "Davey" Davidson (Claudette Colbert) is removed from the aircraft on a stretcher. She is awake, but she is unresponsive to any stimulus. Later, as the women gather on the ship which will transport them back to the United States, they tell their story, which begins on the exact day they shipped out for the land of fun and folic known as Hawaii.

 

So Proudly We Hail is the story of Marine Nurses who are sent to the Bataan Peninsula to help with the wounded during the initial days of World War II. Lieutenant Janet "Davey" Davidson (Claudette Colbert) is the head nurse.

 

Under her tutelage are Lt. Joan O'Doul (Paulette Goddard) and Lt. Rosemary Larson (Barbara Britton). O' Doul is man crazy; she is engaged to two guys simultaneously, both of them military men who have come to kiss her goodbye, thus creating a problem that requires Davey's help so Joan can squirm away without causing bad feelings. Fighting the Japanese is difficult enough without fights breaking out among each other over some dame.

 

Rosemary is leaving home for the first time and is being seen off by her parents (Byron Foulger and Elsa Janssen), who ask Davey to ensure their daughter gets back home safely. And since Hawaii seems to be such a nice provincial place to visit, it's a promise Davey has no trouble agreeing to, although it's evident that she would have made the promise even if circumstances were different. It takes little time for circumstances to become different.

 

The nurses' destination is supposed to be Pearl Harbor, but in the middle of their voyage, the Japanese poop on everybody's party, launching a sneak attack. Instead of Pearl Harbor, their ship wanders aimlessly on the open sea, accompanied by a convoy awaiting new orders. Things were a mess directly after December 7th, so it took a while for everybody to get their shit together and get on the same page.

Unfortunately, the accompanying convoy is torpedoed by a sub. Although most of the crew is killed, some do manage to survive. One of these is injured Lieutenant Medical Technician John Summers (George Reeves). When he refuses to let the nurses bathe him, Davy steps in, shows him who the boss is, and never has love blossomed so quickly with so little soap.  
  

Lt. Olivia D'Arcy (Veronica Lake) has escaped the carnage uninjured and is placed under Davy's command. She comes aboard with a significant chip on her shoulder. Olivia hates camaraderie. She wants to be left alone to do her job, doesn't want advice, and doesn't want friendship.


Also on board is a former collegiate football player who goes by the name of "Kansas" (Sonny Tufts) and develops an instant attraction to boy-crazy Joan. He is a klutz at times, pretty much a doofus, but is always kind-hearted.

 

He has a habit of saying things that eventually seem to come true: I never catch a cold, I never get sunburned, I never get wounded, and I never get killed.

 

Eventually, after a big fight with Davy and the rest of the girls, Olivia breaks down to tell us what her problem is. Hint: It isn't hemorrhoids.

 

The boy that Olivia was going to get married to was slaughtered during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Her only goal now is not to heal the sick but to kill Japs. Lots and lots of Japs. Her words, not mine.

 

Shortly after, the nursing corps is ordered to Bataan, where Captain "Ma" McGregor (Mary Servoss) oversees the medical personnel. Once there, Davy and the gang discover how bad the situation is.

 

There is never enough doctor or nurses. Medical equipment and medicine are in short supply or non-existent. Sleep or rest comes only when one is exhausted and can go no further. They are constantly being bombarded by the Japanese, and the war seems lost before it has even begun. It is up to Ma to make sure the girls do their nurse thing without any distractions. That means she must also put the kibosh on the ever-blossoming romance between Davey and John. The nurses are there to attend to the wounded, not to be out wooing and screwing.

 

But true love will not be denied, no matter how many bombs are raining down on you.

Ma also has a son who is in the Philippines fighting. From the little information provided, I guess they are descendants of a family with a long history of military service. It's an honorable profession if there ever was one, but one can't help but feel that, at times, it's a dead-end job.

 

Joan is assigned to care for the Filipino children, while revenge-minded Olivia volunteers to care for the Japanese wounded.

 

Rosemary assists a Filipino surgeon, Dr. Jose Bardia (Ted Hecht), who speaks endlessly of the tragedy and consequences of war. At the same time, he patches men, women, and children up, only to see them killed again.

When delivering a breach birth from a woman who will die soon, Dr. Bardia lectures as if he is still at the university and already has learned about the uselessness and the heartbreak of war:  

You must forgive me if I talk while I'm operating. I'm so used to lecturing my students. Sometimes I thank my stars for my scientific education. A baby to be born, breach delivery, only three out of five live. Live for what? Don't people die fast enough without destroying each other? Is life too long? No, we mustn't ask that. I wonder how scientific those heaps out on the battlefield feel. Guns, machines, so much rubbish. What was it in my student days? Chemically a man is worth 97 cents. Probably $1.05. What with the shortage of parts and monopoly now, the dead have risen in value. Two for $1.98 on dollar day. This little fellow we're about to introduce to the world tonight, what for him? I don't know. They forgot to teach me about spirit somewhere. Ninety seven cents worth of body but a priceless spirit. May he be born to live in freedom."

 

But if we were worth 97 cents in the early forties, how much are we now when adjusted for inflation? I guess I'll look that up. Before long, Rosemary becomes his second set of hands and they are inseparable.

 

When not taking care of their medical needs, Joan entertains the children with wondrous tails about the heroic deeds of Superman. One of the children asks if Superman is so good, why isn't he here helping them. Joan replied, "He just landed with the Marines; his name is Kansas." (On a side note: the irony here is that George Reeves, who plays John Summers, would go on to play Superman on TV.)

 

As the Japanese close in, the nurses are forced to evacuate the wounded from one base to the next. And evacuation is not always easy, as some will sacrifice, some will die, and a few will live on with lives that will forever be altered.

 

At one stopping point, there is no hospital. It is nothing more than a jungle where the patients are kept hidden as much as possible, even though there are between five and eight thousand of them. Malaria and dysentery became common.

 

This film was released in 1943, in the middle of the war. Do not expect any kind words regarding the Japanese. They were our enemy then, and So Proudly We Hail makes doubly sure that they are painted with the strokes of the broad brush of wickedness, even down to calling a pet monkey Tojo because "he looks just like him." Him being Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.

 

When the bombing attacks come, director Mark Sandrich and his special effects crew make them as realistic as any I've seen in films that decade. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for its special effects. As for Sandrich, he would pass away just two years after this film’s release at the age of 44.

 

Writer Allan Scott's Oscar-nominated script is much better than one usually finds in some by-the-numbers war films of the forties. But I began to get annoyed with Walter Abel's chaplain, whose preachiness got to be a bit too much. They are more like rambling political speeches instead of prayers. He was better and funnier playing Fred Astaire's agent in Holiday Inn. Here, he is just downbeat, downcast, and dour. Bring on, Father Mulcahy.

 

The romance between Davy and John is sometimes dwelled on more than it should be and threatens to derail the film occasionally. Reeves is good here, and so is Colbert. I wish all of their scenes together didn't have to be played as if they were star-struck. But what can I say except that if War is Hell, Love on the Battlefield is a bittersweet catastrophe.

 

But Alan Scott balances things out by having the type of non-romantic romance between Kansas and Joan become more of a battle of wits, with Goddard always having the upper hand over the love-struck and hapless Kansas in a role Tufts was probably born to play.

 

What I found most impressive is that Scott was able to insert Dr. Bardia's clearly anti-war speech into the film and has Davey lamenting about our own failures as a country.

 

"Why isn't there any quinine? Why isn't there any food? Why isn't there any supplies? Why are we waiting here like rats in a cage waiting for the man to come and pour scalding water over us? Why was nothing done? Why? I'll tell you why, it's our own fault. Because we believed WE WERE the world. That the United States was the whole wide world.Those outlandish places, Bataan, Corregidor, and Mindanao. They're not American Names. They're just American graveyards.

But there is plenty of rah-rah patriotic cheerleading as well as to why it's necessary to fight and why we have to die, which generally ends with the observation that we didn't start this war, but we sure as hell were going to finish it. Those kinds of proclamations went hand in hand with every war movie released at the time.

 

Stir in Miklos Rozsa's emotion-laden memorable score and Charles Lang's top-notch black and white cinematography, which will make it seem as if the bombs are exploding in your face as they fall.

 

Rozsa did stellar work for MGM for years, including greats such as Ben-Hur, Double Indemnity, Quo-Vadis, and The Asphalt Jungle. Lang has a list of credits a mile long and was one of the great directors of photography. I would like to know if any of today's young audiences could actually appreciate what people like Rozsa and Lang brought to the art of filmmaking. But let's be honest here.

 

This is Colbert, Goddard's, and Lake's film; they are magnificent in it. To see these three legendary actresses working together would make this film worth purchasing. Still, they put everything they have into these roles, and it shows in every single scene.

 

They didn't just show up to get screen time and a paycheck. They go from being just nurses to becoming as tough and gritty as any man ever thought of being during the war. And in two unforgettable scenes that make this film memorable, Veronica Lake almost steals the movie out from under her costars.

 

Paulette Goddard received a best actress in a supporting role nomination. Certainly deserved, as her and Tuft's scenes are a joy to watch, and Joan is easily the most entertaining character. Without her, the film would be too downbeat and dour to contemplate.

 

And me being the nosy reviewer, I went back to check on the Oscars given out that year for best actress. One beatified nun trumps three WWII nurses as Jennifer Jones took home the prize for Song of Bernadette. It's been too long since I've seen that film, so I won't pass judgment. At least not today.

 

And although one certainly can't argue against the fact that Casablanca deservedly won Best Picture, this film should have at least been nominated over such forgettable fare as The Human Comedy and For Whom The Bell Tolls. But it's tough to rehash 70-year-old Oscar history.

 

The men aren't too shabby, either. In his film debut, Sonny Tufts won a nomination for Best Supporting Actor and did a stellar job bringing the character of Kansas to life. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a long downward slide for him. From the IMDB:

 

An old college football injury had disqualified him for military duty, and so, with many of Hollywood's younger leading men serving overseas in World War II, this tall, blond, blue-eyed actor became something of a star, if only by default. But by the turn of the decade he had found his name in print on account of his off-screen activities. In 1949 he had been found drunk on a Hollywood sidewalk. In 1950 he was sued by two women for allegedly biting each of them in the thigh. In 1951 his wife had him jailed for drunkenness. The name Sonny Tufts itself became a joke. Thereafter he made few films, but could be found in occasional guest appearances on inconsequential TV shows. He died of pneumonia at age 58.

 

Poor George Reeves. He's actually excellent in this film as the romantic lead. Unfortunately, beyond that, he never gets to stretch his acting legs. At least not here. He has a long list of credits to his name, but roles like that of John Stephens and one of the Tarleton Twins in Gone With the Wind have been largely forgotten as he was typecast forever as Superman in the hit TV show of the 50's. And whether or not he was murdered or committed suicide is beyond my expertise on the subject. I was six years old when that event occurred.

 

Suppose he hated having been typecast as the Man of Steel. Unfortunately, it is forever inscribed on his tomb marker.

 

It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman. So Proudly We Hail is the kind of film that every person, regardless of sex, should see. It is undoubtedly the kind of film they should be making even today, featuring what women are capable of.

 

Amazingly, a film of this quality seldom gets any notice, even when they trot out every war movie ever made for Memorial Day Weekend. No, it may not have John Wayne battling it out on the front lines, but it has so much more to offer in so many ways, and you know, when a film has that, I have no choice but to give it my grade of A.

 

So Proudly We Hail is available on DVD and, more recently, on a sparkling new Bluray from Kino Lorber. You can find it streaming as a purchase on various sources such as Vudu or Amazon.

 

The film occasionally appeared on Turner Classic Movies, but I do not know if it still does. It was once introduced in a showing on TCM by Cher on 4/12/2013. Great choice by her for this movie and the one following it, Since You Went Away.

And before I forget, adjusted for inflation, the cost of the human body is now worth $14.92.

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From the Clyde's Movie Palace located in the back of the Secret Headquarters of the CIA: Our Man Flint 1966

By 1965, with the release of Thunderball, Ian Fleming's James Bond character was the most famous spy on the planet. There were no substitutes.
 
Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Brocolli had latched onto a gold mine when they brought 007, played by Sean Connery, to the big screen. But Bond served On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and Hollywood did not have an equivalent screen icon to rake in oodles of cash.
 
The powers-that-be at 20th Century Fox decided to give it the good old American try. And who knows? Maybe they thought they would be lucky enough to hit pay-dirt.
 
Enter Our Man Flint (1966) (aka Derek Flint), played by James Coburn. Flint doesn't have a secret agent number like Bond but works as an Independent. He has this thing about not following orders or becoming someone else's beck-and-call spy. He is, in fact, pretty much dropped out of the Spy business as he has too many other interests, like teaching the Russian Ballet in Moscow, fencing, and giving Karate Lessons.


Flint also has four assistants. We'll call them that, although they act as personal servants, giving him shaves, haircuts, fetching his slippers. Still, most of all, just keeping him company. If you guessed that they are all females, congratulations! You win a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, but you'll have to chase down Ralphie and get it from him.


Flint's former boss, who was barking out orders to Derek when he was spying for the government, is Cramden, played by Lee J. Cobb. I wonder if Cramden is his first name or his last name. The movie never says one way or the other. 


Cramden wants nothing more to do with Flint because any spy who can't follow protocol and take orders is not a spy worth having, no matter how good they are. And Flint is the best, so Cramden is kind of an idiot as far as that goes.
 
But the world is in crisis. Some nefarious group is controlling the weather worldwide, causing havoc and making a damn nuisance of themselves by drowning cities, erupting volcanoes, causing avalanches, and making hurricanes and various other weather catastrophes. In other words, they are making a damn nuisance of themselves from their secret submarine hideout.


Whenever ZOWIE, the spy organization run by Cramden, sends out their spies to end this fiasco, they return dead.


So Cramden, gathering all his fellow spy bosses from around the world, has them write down the qualifications they deem necessary for an agent to bring down the enemy. And much to Cramden's chagrin, after all the computer punch-out cards (those were the days) are submitted and processed, the recommended spy is Derek Flint every time. Still, it takes a phone call from the President to get Cramden to agree to hire Flint.
 
Flint does not intend to return to work, spying for a guy who can't stand him.
 
Only after Flint has to save Cramden from a poisonous dart shot out of a harp by an enemy agent, Gila (Gila Golan), aided by henchman Malcolm Rodney (Edward Mulhare) and Hans Gruber (Michael St. Clair), that is meant for Flint, does he agree to take the case.


Cramden wants Flint to have a team of agents at his disposal. Flint works alone. Cramden wants Flint to use the agency's secret code. Flint has his own code, a mathematical progression: 40-26-36 based on, well, you know. Cramden has a briefcase with 65 weapons. Flint has a cigarette lighter with 82 different functions, 83 if you need to light a cigar.


After a little bit of bouillabaisse detection, Flint heads to Marseilles in his private jet to begin his mission to save the world from Gina, Rodney, Gruber, and three scientists, Dr. Krupov (Rhys Williams), Dr. Schneider (Benson Fong) and Dr. Wu (Peter Brocco), in charge of an organization called Galaxy that doesn't want to destroy the world, but to save the world from itself by controlling the weather.
 
Gina is given the assignment to dispose of Flint. When she fails at first, she discovers his four weaknesses (Guess who?) and has them kidnapped to put in the service of Galaxy.
 
Flint realizes he is walking into a trap but is not deterred from his mission, even taking a little time off to have a sexual liaison with Gina.



Can you blame him? But, as we learned earlier, he has mastered placing himself into a coma-like state by lowering his heartbeat to undetectable levels. It aids him immeasurably in his mission, along with his trusty cigarette lighter.

        
When Gina proclaims Flint is no ordinary man, she isn't just whistling Dixie. 

This was a fun movie when, at 14, I saw it with my friend, Tim, at the Laroy Theater in Portsmouth. Over 50 years later, watching it in my home theater the other night, it's still a good time at the movies.        
 
This is due in no small part to James Coburn, who, as Flint, manages to make us believe he is the most remarkable person on the planet and can really do these things. Yes, he is arrogant, but that arrogance also helps keep him alive.

I’ve always liked much of Coburn’s work on screen. He finally got the recognition he deserved as Best Supporting Actor in 1997 for Affliction.  You can watch (as of 6/11/23) for free on Freevee with the usual shit pot full of ads, or you can buy a standard definition streaming copy on Vudu.  Being a loyal commercial hater, I’d opt for Hard Times (1975), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Carey Treatment (1972), Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966) or The Great Escape (1960).
 
Lee J. Cobb, who had a long productive career in film and television, portrays the flustered, straight arrow and overly bureaucratic head of Galaxy straight down the middle, His most notable films would undoubtedly be 12 Angry Men and as Lt. Kinderman in The Exorcist.
 
Although an enemy agent, Gila Golan is charming, beautiful, and damn sexy, if I may say so. As we teenagers used to say back before chauvinism became a thing, we wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers. Maybe they still say that. I wouldn't kick my wife out of bed for that, but I would ask her to get some crackers and cheese for a late-night snack. She costarred in the Jerry Lewis film, 3 on a Couch, shortly after Our Man Flint.


A few years later Gina would show up in what has now become a cult favorite, The Valley of Gwangi.  After that she would do one more film and then pretty much drop out of sight.  But she has one helluva back story.
  
Edward Mulhare, as Rodney, is as sleazy and underhanded as someone named Rodney could be. Three years later, when he seduced young naive Karen Valentine from Room 222 in a film called Gidget Grows Up, I still thought he was damn creepy.
 
As Derek Flint said, "I wonder what it is that always makes the Rodneys choose the wrong side."
 
Derek Flint never became as big as Bond, but the movie did make enough to warrant a sequel by 20th Century Fox. Being one of my favorite films from my teen years, it was an easy purchase from the now-defunct Twilight Time Label on Bluray and the sequel, In Like Flint. You can get the Standard Definition DVD at a reasonable price. Still long out of print, the Bluray will set you back, making my purchase ten years ago a good one. The screencaps you see here come from that Bluray.
 
Part of the reason Flint only received one sequel may have been because Dean Martin came along as Matt Helm in The Silencers just a few months after the release of Flint. The Matt Helm series seemed popular enough as Martin went on to make three more films in the series. But I always found them too goofy, although you could call them spy spoofs, not as extremely silly as the Austin Powers Movies that came along quite a few decades later.
 
However, you can buy the film for streaming in HD at Amazon Prime for $12.09 or rent for $3.79 (as of this writing). Don't expect the Bluray to return, as the film sits in the vast wasteland of the Disney vault, courtesy of their pointless buyout of 20th Century Fox. They decided to shit on most of those films by castigating them to their dead-end locker, not even to be sent to labels like Shout Factory or Kino Lorber to at least be reissued. At Disney, if you aren't Star Wars, Marvel, or Pixar, you're dead to them.

And for being such an entertaining movie no matter how you watch it, and because Flint is the world’s greatest spy, I see no reason to give this film anything less than a B+.

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