The Black Swan (1942)

The Black Swan is a delight! I love a good swashbuckling adventure film, and this one is one of the best. It's funny to me that most of these pirate movies Hollywood are actually films about nationalism. The English, the Spanish, the Americans. Of course, this is a WWII film, and so the question really is about betrayal and who you can trust, and alliances. In any case, this is a lot of fun, and Tyrone Power is just great – aside from being impossibly handsome.

This above All (1942)

The first act of This above All is great. It's a class conscious story about a very rich woman who joins up with the Women's Air Force unit in Britain and pays no attention to her class. The second act of this is even better. It's a love story in which Joan Fontaine (who is luminous and charming) falls in love with the most handsome stranger she could possibly meet. He's super mysterious and secretive and the whole thing is sexy and intriguing and fun. And then act three happens and we're in full blown WWII propaganda mode. It's all faith and truth and fighting for what you believe in and marriage and god and England and well... whatever. Let's just say it lost steam. Still, the effects are great, the production design is excellent, and the bombing of London sequence is stellar. Tyrone Power is gorgeous (obviously) but speaks in a US American accent the entire time and literally never bothers to try to pass as a Briton. Meanwhile Joan Fontaine might as well be in a George Eliot novel.

Reap the Wild Wind (1942)

The weirdest thing about this weird film is that it really wishes it were Gone with the Wind. And that may seem a very odd thing to say about a movie that boasts an underwater battle with a giant squid as well as numerous storms at sea, a ventriloquized lapdog, and a besuited monkey, but here we are. First it's an action film, then it's a very silly romantic comedy, then it's an action film again – obviously written for Errol Flynn – then it becomes a courtroom drama for twenty minutes?? And then the giant squid shows up? This thing is insane. To make weird matters even weirder, John Wayne is not the hero. 

Of course, it is called Reap the Wild Wind, so the film itself knows very well it wants to be Gone with the Wind, and Cecil B. DeMille knows it too. The whole thing is just too stupid for all that. This is not, despite what the poster says, Cecil B. DeMille's greatest. Not even close.

Louise Beavers (who is always lovable) is doing her best Hattie McDaniel. Also Ray Milland is fine, but I kind of hate Paulette Goddard. She is no Vivien Leigh and that is for sure. Susan Hayward and Robert Preston both play smaller parts in this film. Both acquit themselves without embarrassment.

But I think the central trouble with Reap the Wild Wind is that DeMille's characters aren't people. They are so burdened with meaning and symbolism, that even a good actor like Ray Milland is playing a kind of symbol for the South and John Wayne a symbol for "untamed men of the sea" or somesuch business. And Goddard gets to symbolize Florida itself. The whole thing is so overwrought there's just no room for the humanity that might have appeared with these characters under circumstances other than a movie by Cecil B. DeMille.

As far as I can tell, Reap the Wild Wind isn't streaming anywhere. The DVD is hard to come by, and it sat in the very long wait section of my Netflix queue for a long time. But that's how I finally watched it.

Kings Row (1942)

The story of the making of Kings Row is, I think, more interesting than the film itself. Let's just start by saying that this movie is a fairly awful melodrama, mostly because Robert Cummings and Ronald Reagan are legitimately terrible in this, especially Robert Cummings, who gives an absurdly milquetoast performance. But it's worse than that. Excellent performers like Judith Anderson and Claude Rains are also fairly bad in this. 

What is interesting about the movie is that it is based on a famous mid-century potboiler novel that, apparently (though one wouldn't know it from the film) was about incest and homosexuality and all sorts of illicit eroticism and terrible sadism. Who knew? Very little of that comes across in this movie, which is only cursorily interested in Freudian psychiatry. In any case, it's shot beautifully and designed beautifully, but the acting is truly awful, and the screenplay is a hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't really work. I, for one, am getting ahold of this novel so I can see what all the fuss was about in 1940. Oh I meant to talk about the score, which is amazing and in which you can clearly hear Star Wars! John Williams obviously borrowed at least one theme from Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Give it a listen and see if you hear it.

Flying Tigers (1942)

I am just really into WWII pilot movies right now. This one takes place in China with the volunteer force the Flying Tigers, who flew over China before the U.S. entered the war. This movie would be a stinker if its flight sequences weren't totally fucking cool. The script is fairly bad, and John Wayne is horribly, terribly wooden in this. It's odd – he's obviously a great movie star, but he lacks any charm in Flying Tigers for reasons I don't really understand. John Carroll, on the other hand, is every bit the movie star and actually gives a sensitive, intriguing performance. Gordon Jones is great in this too, and the special effects, the photography, the sound, really everything about the flight sequences and the explosions is excellent. This film premiered on Oct 2, 1942, after it ends with a sequence in Dec 1941, and it was clearly a rush job on the pre-production side, so I guess I can't be too mad at the half-written script.

......One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in WWII movies right now, but I am, especially ones about flying and ones made during the war. This one is great.

......One of Our Aircraft Is Missing was written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. It's absolutely great! The script is excellent, and Ronald Neame's photography is absolute genius. There are so many shots that are jaw dropping. It's really a superb bit of work. The special effects in this movie are great, too, and then there is the acting. The men aren't much to write home about, but Joyce Redman and Googie Withers both give stellar performances. This is a really good one.

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

To Be or Not to Be is brilliant. This Ernst Lubitsch gem switches from broadly hilarious to deadly serious with superb deftness. Lubitsch has made a perfect film. It's just so funny while also being very, very serious and – in the last act and according to the rule of threes – deeply moving.

I Married a Witch (1942)

I Married a Witch is a delightfully fun film by René Clair that he made in Hollywood with Fredric March, Veronica Lake, and Cecil Kellaway in the main roles. It's wickedly, laugh-out-loud funny with a whimsical score, and a great script. I had a great time. I also think this would make an amazing musical. Someone should write this!

You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

I think this title is right and Rita Hayworth was never lovelier. The gowns in this movie. It's impossible not to love her in this film. The most important thing that this poster is getting right is that we are going to You Were Never Lovelier to see Rita Hayworth (and her figure!). Astaire is great – his usual charming self, but Hayworth is stunning.

I watched this as a palate cleanser after the not-so-great H.C. Potter-directed, Astaire-starring Second Chorus from 1940. You Were Never Lovelier was obviously made to bank on the success of the Astaire–Hayworth musical comedy You'll Never Get Rich from 1941, and the studio was right to make another Astaire–Hayworth movie as soon as possible. This one is tons of fun, has great dance numbers, and has Rita Hayworth at her most absolutely gorgeous. This is a delightful film.

My Sister Eileen (1942)

My Sister Eileen is very funny. This film adaptation is a bit stagey for me, but the material is really rooted in a set of jokes about crowding one small apartment, so perhaps there is no helping the stageiness.

For Me and My Gal (1942)

For Me and My Gal is a fun romantic comedy with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly.

...And then it takes this very serious turn and becomes a war propaganda film. I sort of knew it would be, I guess. Any musical (jukebox or original) from 1942 is bound to be designed just to sell war bonds and sell the war, but this one sort of surprised me, mostly because it really is a strange turn for the film. This is a Busby Berkeley film, but not a Busby Berkeley film.

Oh, I think it is worth saying that Judy Garland and George Murphy are acting the hell out of this movie, and give actually deeply moving performances. For a nonsense Busby Berkeley war propaganda movie, it's quite astonishing. Their work is great.

The movie, on the other hand, is just a bit of jukebox fluff.

Wake Island

Wake Island was apparently a huge box-office smash in 1942, as well as being widely acclaimed by critics. I was less impressed than the USAmerican populace in 1942, I guess. Act one is actually awful – stilted writing, bad acting, awkward editing.

Act two involves this absurd monologue about how women create memories or something. But the good part of acts two and three is the bombing of Wake island by Japanese forces. The sound, the explosions, the tension of it – all of that is great. I loved all of the air sequences too: they're balletic and exciting and dynamic.

As for the film's politics, Wake Island island surprised me by valorizing suicidal sacrifice by USAmerican soldiers. As much as the Japanese kamikaze would be demonized by United States media, our own media celebrated suicidal missions and sacrificing one's self for one's nation.

As for actual violence, Wake Island soft pedals things, like most films from this period under the PCA. When a man dies, he sort of clutches his breast, seizes up, and collapses. This isn't Bataan. Men don't bleed in Wake Island; they just fall over.

Honestly, though, it's sort of crazy that John Farrow made this movie in 1942, less than a year after the actual battle for Wake. And I was shocked to find that the film also references the Warsaw ghetto! Wake Island was released in August 1942, and evacuations of Polish Jews to Treblinka had only begun earlier that Summer.

The film ends with an upbeat musical sequence, over which a voice intones: "These marines fought a great fight!" as though the whole thing were a game. It's an odd bit of nonsense, that quote obviously makes the whole thing seem like a bit of fun rather than a slaughter in which hundreds of men were killed.

In any case, this ended up being sort of cool to watch, even if it is, more often than not, overly sentimental and awkwardly made.

The Pied Piper

Typical sentimental war-time patriotic nonsense. I love Monty Woolley as much as the next guy, but this batch of silliness?