Bright Victory (1951)

Bright Victory is a sentimental tale about which I don't have much to say. There is one really great moment halfway through the film in which the main character (whom we're supposed to like) says some racist language in front of his black friend. See, he hates black people, but he's blind and so he doesn't realize that his best friend is black. This is all quite contrived, of course, but this scene is really shocking, and I was upset by it despite my skepticism about this movie in general and its disability metaphors.

Listen, Bright Victory is no The Best Years of Our Lives. And the idea of being literally color-blind strikes me as schmaltzy, even for 1951.

Two queer connections that are worth making: the film's title is clearly a reference to Dark Victory, the Bette Davis starrer from 1939, which also starred Ronald Reagan (feh). In Dark Victory, Bette Davis's character goes blind at the end of the film. This was a "woman's" film, of course, and the twist of Bright Victory is that our hero, Arthur Kennedy, deals with blindness in a "masculine" way by working through his disability and becoming a useful member of the U.S. American labor force. His victory is therefore bright rather than dark. Whatever. The other queer item of note in this movie is that Rock Hudson has a small part at the beginning of Bright Victory, and he's great. He wasn't a star yet in 1951?