Bombs over Burma

 

Anna May Wong is a great actress and it's too bad that the racism of the day usually prevented her from getting more than supporting roles in A-movies (there are a few exceptions), she did get the lead role in occasional B-movies. PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), one of the Poverty Row studios, put her at the head of the cast of a 1942 war movie titled Bombs Over Burma. The rationale at PRC might have been purely business oriented--she was a name that would help sell the film on the Chinese market. That is speculation rather than objective fact, but in any case, a starring role is nonetheless a starring role.

She plays a Chinese school teacher named Lin Ying who also works as an espionage agent, helping in her own way to fight against the invading Japanese. Her mission in this film--find out what enemy agent is feeding the Japanese information about important supply convoys travelling along the Burma Road.

This mission put her on a bus driven by an American expatriate named Slim. Her fellow passengers are an eclectic group of Americans and Europeans. When a damaged bridge forces them to stop for the night at a Buddhist monastery, the situation grows dangerous.

Lin Ying discovers the monk who runs the monastery has a secret room with a short-wave radio, but there is an initial uncertainty about whose side he's on. Then there's a murder. False accusations abound and it looks like Lin Ying might get framed for being the enemy agent.

It turns out she's one step ahead of the bad guy the whole time, running a con on him to force him to give himself away and leading to his rather brutal demise.

Like all wartime films dealing with the war, it is propaganda. But that's not a bad thing. When Slim admits he stays in China because he was bullied growing up and now hates seeing China bullied--he calls the coolies working through the night to repair the bridge his blood brothers--it generates more honest emotion than we usually see in Poverty Row films. (For a modern viewer who knows that post-war China would be ruled by one of history's greatest mass murderers, there's unintended poignancy that the filmmakers could not have planned for in 1942.)

It's not a perfect film--even with a short 65-minute run time, there are a few times when scenes are dragged out too long. But the mystery behind the identity of the enemy agent is a reasonably good one and Anna May Wong gives an excellent and grounded performance. She was an actress who always deserved a chance to shine.

Here's the move on YouTube:

Submarines and Stock Footage

 

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the 1959 film Paratroop Command. That was released as a double-feature with Submarine Seahawk. I promised to review Seahawk the next week. But then my wife made me read a romance novel, which nearly broke my sanity and forced me to change my schedule. 

But I am now getting to Submarine Seahawk (which, by the way, is listed to having been produced in 1958--I guess they had it in the can and waited until the next year for another WWII movie with which to pair it up). 

Seahawk is a vetaran sub with a veteran crew. As the movie opens, we join them at the end of their latest cruise, using up their last few torpedoes to sink a Japanese destroyer. This almost goes wrong when one of those torpedoes gets jammed in the tube. But the sub's new operations officer--Paul Turner--acts quickly to fix the problem and launch the fish.

Everyone acknowledges Turner (played by John Bentley) to be an excellent officer in many ways. But the captain thinks he's too aloof and academic to click with a crew, so recommends that he not be given his own command.

That captain, though, finds himself promoted to a desk job when Seahawk returns to Pearl Harbor. He recommends his XO as the new commander. But the Navy decides to keep the XO in his current post and make Turner the captain.

So Turner goes to sea on an important mission--find out where the Japanese are congregating their capital ships--with a second-in-command who resents him and a crew that grows increasingly frustrated when Turner keeps refusing to attack enemy shipping.

This last part, I think, comes across as a little contrived. The crew is experienced and they might regret not being able to attack the enemy, but it's no secret that Seahawk is on a scouting mission. Everyone from the XO to the lowliest enlisted man should have understood this. They were being sneaky not so they could put a torpedo in a relatively unimportant ship. They were being sneaky so they could find the really important ship.

This all follows the expected character arcs. The officers and crew (except for an increasingly unstable rookie officer) gradually comes to respect their captain and understand that he knows what he's doing. Especially after he does indeed find the Japanese fleet.

My other complaint with the movie is that it spends far too much of its 73-minute run time at Pearl Harbor, vainly trying to generate some humor with the shenanigans the sailors get into while ashore. Much as with the humor in Paratroop Command, the humor simply falls flat.

But despite this, the movie is entertaining enough to justify its 73-minute existence. The cruise of the Seahawk does generate tension and the combat scenes are done well. This is helped enormously by use of stock footage from the Warner Brothers movies Destination Tokyo and Air Force. Apparently, the producer has a contact at WB and was able to wangle permission to use the footage. This is skillfully woven into Submarine Seahawk, making it look far more impressive than its tiny budget would have otherwise allowed.

Also, the cramped sets on the submarine look authentic and the procedures they use have a verneer of realism to them. Of course, there could be any number of operational or procedural errors in the film that I just wouldn't notice, but the film either gets a lot of it right or fakes it well.

I Guess I'll Make it a Triple Feature

 

A week ago, I reviewed The Bonnie Parker Story, which was directed by William Witney and starred Jack Hogan. A few years ago, I reviewed Cat Burgler, which was also directed by Witney and starred Jack Hogan.

So now I feel obligated to complete a Witney/Hogan triple feature with a review of the 1959 movie Paratroop Command. 

This one actually shares three cast members with The Bonnie Parker Story--Hogan, Ken Lynch and Richard Bakalyn. In this case, Bakalyn is the lead character--a paratrooper named Charlie.

The film opens with a combat drop into North Africa. Scattered around at first, the Americans gradually regroup as they run into German soldiers. At one point, a soldier called the Cowboy mistakenly thinks Charlie has frozen up. Charlie loses touch with the rest of his unit for a while.

When he shows up again, he shoots and kills Cowboy, mistaking him for a German. You can see exactly what happens in the clip below. Though a tragedy, it is clearly an accident and Charlie can't reasonably be blamed. But Cowboy has had time to say that Charlie had frozen. Cowboy's best friend Ace (Hogan) is convinced Charlie murdered Cowboy to keep his cowardice a secret. Several others in the unit, at the very least, don't quite trust Charlie.

{On a side note: one doesn't expect complete realism in most movies, but notice in the scene below that Cowboy--a trained soldier--points a live weapon at a fellow soldier. That's a dumb thing to do, even in jest. Notice that he's not even observing proper trigger discipline. To be fair, though, in the adreneline rush that follows what he just accomplished in knocking out the German bunker, maybe this is understandable if not excusable.}

The lieutenant believes Charlie and gives him a chance to transfer to another unit and start fresh. But by this time, the story has spread across the entire division. Charlie would have to transfer out of the paratroops. And he won't do that. All his life, he's felt he was a screw-up. Joining an elite unit is his best chance to accomplish something. He won't give up his chance now.

The second act of the movie takes place in Sicily and involves a well-choreographed fight set around a farmhouse. There's a couple of really effective moments here, such as when a haystack behind which Germans are hiding is set on fire and the scene actually manages to generate sympathy for the bad guys when they run out with their uniforms blazing. During this fight, Charlie is ordered to stand down when he has a moment to help because he's still not trusted by the others.

The last act is set at Salerno. The unit is tasked with finding a concentration of German tanks and reporting their position to the Air Force. The unit is pinned down and takes casualties. The lieutenant has spotted the tanks and has the radio, but he's wounded and unable to move. Charlie has the generator needed to power the radio. To get the generator to the radio, he has to cross an open road seeded with land mines while under fire from the Germans.

Charlie is finally given a chance to accomplish something worthwhile. 

 Like the fight at the farm house, this final action scene is well-choreographed and honestly surprised me in who got killed and wounded. 

There are a few weaks points. The banter between two characters (the Sergeant and Pigpen) fails to generate the laughs it's supposed to. The low budget shows in that every American has a Tommy gun and every German has an MP 40 (probably what the studio had available).  A few M1s or carbines mixed in would have been nice. Also, we hear ricochets, but never see one, implying that the movie's budget didn't include squibs. 

Even so, Paratroop Command is a good movie, with a strong cast and Witney's direction lifting it over the weak points in the script and its low budget. 

Over the past three weeks, I've reviewed three B-movies--the first two because they were originally released as a double-feature, then the third because it shared an actor and a director with one of those. Then I connected this with a fourth B-movie I review a few years ago. Now, I must resist the urge to expend another Thursday post next week on the movie that played with Paratroop Command as a double-feaure: another WWII flick titled Submarine Seahawk.

Oh, who am I kidding? I'm not going to resist the urge at all. Join me next week for a review of Submarine Seahawk.

By the way, Jack Hogan isn't the only actor in this movie who would later appear regularly in the TV series Combat! The German captain we meet during the farm house fight is played by Paul Busch, who popped up on Combat! dozens of times as a German soldier. Not the same one, since he usually got killed in each episode in which he appeared. Busch was a 2nd generation American, but his mom was from Germany and he spoke the language fluently. Playing Germans in WWII films and TV shows pretty much represented a steady paycheck for him during the 1960s.

I can't make up my mind if I like this movie!

 

Tank Commandos (1959) is an aggravating movie in a weird way. It's a very, very low budget WWII film with a fairly simple premise. The Americans are trying to capture a German-held town during the Italian campaign. But the Germans are somehow able to keep bringin reinforcements over a river despite the fact that all the bridges have been blown. An American demolitions squad has to find out how this is being accomplished and put a stop to it--hopefully by blowing something up, since that's what they are good at.

We actually get to see what the Germans are up to in the opening scene. They are using a bridge built just barely underneath the surface of the river--keeping it hidden from view but still allowing German tanks to drive across.  A young Italian boy also sees this, then dodges German soldiers by ducking down a sewer. When he comes up, he's in the middle of a firefight and gets brought away by the American squad.

It's all good stuff as far as the plot is concerned. And I'm okay with the filmmakers using then-modern M60 tanks to stand in for German tanks. (I'm assuming they were borrowed from the National Guard.) This is unavoidable in most war movies from this time. The small arms, at least, looked reasonably accurate.

Where the movie fails is in character and dialogue. Gee whiz, the melodrama flies thicker than bullets. Potentially strong scenes that could have generated honest emotion simply fall flat because of awkward dialogue and wooden acting. For instance, the commander of the demo squad spends a scene telling a nurse how much it hurts to see any of his men die. That's a perfectly good idea--it's cliched, but only because it's a reflection of real emotion felt by good men in a war. It's a concept that has been used effectively in many war films. Here, though, neither the actors or the script are up to the job. The scene simply comes across as empty (and slightly painful) melodrama and you want nothing more than for it to end so we can get back to shooting at Germans. 

Later, a soldier meets an Italian woman while on patrol and has a moment in which the two seem to connect, only to have another American soldier accidentally shoot her. Once again, a good idea ruined by sub-par acting and dialogue.

But, darn it, it's a black-and-white movie set during World War II with a good plot buried in their somewhere. Eventually, the Americans learn that the Italian boy knows where the underwater bridge is located. He leads them through the sewers, with the Americans wearing the Scuba equipment they'll need to plant explosives on the bridge after they reach the river. But they encounter Germans in the sewers, giving us some action scenes in an unusual setting. There's an important character death that I did not see coming.

By the way, I know the scuba gear the Americans are using is anachronistic, but I'm okay with that simply because it looks cool.

So, in the end, I can't make up my mind about this movie. Do I like it for a good plot, black-and-white photography and some nifty action scenes? Do I dislike it because of an overdose of melodrama and bad dialogue? I can't make up my mind. 

I don't know if I'll go so far as to watch it again to find out. Here it is--watch it yourselves and tell me what you think:

From Thief to Soldier

They Met in Bombay (1941) starts out as a light-hearted heist film, with two thieves (Clark Gable & Rosalind Russell)--each of whom is initially unaware that the other is also a thief--plot to steal a valuable jewel from a duchess staying at a swanky hotel in Bombay.

Gerald Meldrick, who we find out was once a soldier and is a bit of a danger junkie, plans to swap the jewel with an expertly made fake. He's posing as a Lloyd's of London detective in order to manufacture the opportunity. Anya Von Duren plans to make friends with the Duchess and then quietly slip away with the jewel when she gets the chance. She's posing as a baroness and has meticulously researched the duchess' family in order to impress her.

Both Gable and Russell seem to be having a lot of fun with their roles and both make the best of the witty dialogue they are given.

After a number of shenanigans, the two thieves have the jewel, argue about who should get to keep it, then have to make a run for it together when a local police detective gives chase.

The two take refuge on a seedy merchant ship sailing for Hong Kong. Here the movie smoothly morphs into something that has a look that would later be equated with Film Noir. The ship's captain is wonderfully portrayed by Peter Lorre, who looks as seedy as the ship he commands. When he figures out who is passengers are, he makes plans to turn them over the the cops for reward money as soon as they reach Hong Kong. This forces Anya and Gerald to steal a life boat and row ashore during a foggy night.

What I like about this second act of the movie is the characterization. The  two thieves spend a month or so on this ship and--possibly for the first time in years--they have no reason to lie or maintain a facade. When they begin to fall in love, the performances, dialogue and situation help make it seem real and not simply something that is supposed to happen because movie conventions demand it.

The third act of the film morphs it into a war story. They hide out in Hong Kong, unable to sell the jewel and running out of cash. So Gerald comes up with an idea for a con that requires him to pretend to be a soldier again. But this leads to him getting picked up by a staff car and taken to the British army base when the Japanese land nearby. Gerald abruptly finds himself in command of British troops with the job of evacuating a Chinese village.

The Japanese show up at the village as well. Gerald can't just play soldier now. If he and the soldiers and civilians he's reluctantly responsible for are going to live, he's going to have to actually become a soldier again.

It's a fun movie that manages to switch from one genre to another several times, but to do so smoothly and in a way that makes story sense. They Met in Bombay doesn't seem to be particularly well-remembered, but it should be. It is a fun blend of humor and adventure that eventually deals with themes of honor and responsibility in a very genuine manner. It's definitely a movie worth watching.

A Father to His Men

Submarine movies have some very specific built-in clichés. Probably the most common one is a sub having to endure hours of depth charge attacks from an enemy sub.

Of course, that particular cliché is drawn directly from real-life and is the source of intense excitement when presented effectively in a movie.

Destination Tokyo plays off that cliché beautifully. The U.S.S. Copperfin, having completed a secret mission in Tokyo Bay and then sunk an aircraft carrier, is mercilessly depth charged by Japanese destroyers. And, boy, that scene is incredibly tense.

The movie hits some other clichés as well—though to be fair, some of them hadn’t been around long enough to be clichés in 1943. For instance, the Pharmacist’s Mate has to perform an appendectomy while the sub lies on the bottom of Tokyo Bay, with another crewman reading him instructions out of a book. But the movie does scenes like these so well that cliches or corniness is never a problem. 

Cary Grant plays the sub’s commander in complete “Father to His Men” mode and his quietly authoritative performance is backed by a great cast. The movie runs a little over 2 hours—quite a long one for most films from that era. A lot of the time comes from the fact that a number of the regular crew are given definable character arcs, with the movie spending enough time with each of them to give us a lock on their personalities and get us to really like them a lot. John Garfield—perhaps the best actor in the movie other than Grant—is ironically saddled with the most one-dimensional character in the film, but he still manages to bring a sense of real personality to the role. Dane Clark, Alan Hale, Robert Hutton and William Prince also bring their characters to life.

Technical details all seem authentic as well—one of the screenwriters was a former submariner and the Navy cooperated during production. Of course, Destination Tokyo could have gotten any number of things wrong that I would not notice, but it feels real.  And that adds another layer of strength to the film as a whole.

The story involves the Copperfin sneaking into Tokyo Bay and putting ashore a team that will gather information needed by bombers who will be attacking Japan soon. This is obviously meant to be the Doolittle raid, though the movie is off in its time frame. The crew leaves San Francisco on Christmas Day, but the year isn’t mentioned. One of the crew refers back to the events of Christmas 1941, setting the film in 1942/43. So they are actually a year late to help out Doolittle.

But that really doesn’t bother me—I mention it merely to show off how smart I am. Destination Tokyo is an exciting movie. It is full of wartime propaganda, of course, but anti-Axis propaganda is hardly a bad thing and the emotions generated by the film are sincere. 

Henry Aldrich Goes to War

They really should have left the girl out. Not that Amelita Ward, who plays the love interest in 1943's Aerial Gunner, isn't nice to look at. She is. And she's a perfectly good actress. It's just that she wasn't needed in this particular film.

Aerial Gunner, produced by Paramount's B-movie unit, is pretty much a recruitment film for the Army Air Forces, preaching for the need for trained aerial gunners. This is fine--as long as the story wrapped around all that is a good one.

The story here is largely pretty good. Richard Arlen plays Jon Davis, who was a cop before the war. Chester Morris (who is always fun to watch in a B-movie) is "Foxy" Pattis, the son of an ex-con who blames Arlen for his dad's recent suicide. When war breaks out, Davis enlists. Pattis is drafted, but parleys his sharpshooting skills into an "easy" job as an instructor at gunnery school.






Davis is a trainee at the school. Pattis, still feeling an old grudge, tries to wash him out, pulling several less-than-ethical tricks to do so. But Davis sticks with it. So does fellow trainee Sandy Lunt, who is desperate to make good despite an apparent lack of skill as a gunner.

Lunt, by the way, is played by Jimmy Lydon. When this movie was made, Lydon was also playing teenager Henry Aldrich in a series of films based on the popular radio comedy. So it's kind of fun watching him blast away with a double-barreled .50 caliber machine gun.

The bulk of the movie takes place at gunnery school, giving us a fairly realistic depiction of training. For some, this might be a legitimate reason for thinking the movie drags a little. But I found these scenes to be historically interesting and cool to look at in terms of equipment and airplanes. And, since my taste in such things is clearly impeccable, that ends that argument.

No, for me it's that stupid love story that hurts the film. Davis and Pattis already have a rivalry going, so adding another conflict is extraneous. The romance feels like its there because love interest was simply a part of the accepted formula. Sometimes, that's fine. In this case, it just gets in the way of the cool airplanes. Gee whiz, now I know how Carl Denham felt at the beginning of King Kong. ("Well, isn't there any romance or adventure in the world without having a flapper in it?")

Well, despite the unnecessary flapper, the story moves along nicely. We even get a brief cameo by Robert Mitchum in an early role.

Actually, there is one more glitch. Davis is narrating the film. When he graduates from gunnery school, he tosses in a quick line about getting his commission soon after that, so when the movie jumps into the war in the Pacific, he's suddenly a pilot. It was an awkward transition in a movie that is otherwise perfectly sound in terms of plot construction.

Davis has several of his classmates from gunnery school in his crew as they fly bombing missions against the Japanese. Their plane is a Lockheed Ventura, which in real-life was regulated to training and patrol missions, since it wasn't adequate for bombing missions. But it's what the Air Force had available to let the movie crew use, so we'll be forgiving in this regard. Besides, the Ventura looks a little like a B-25, which would have been a more realistic choice. So we can pretend it is a B-25 and move on from there.

A tragedy at gunnery school involving Sandy Lunt has convinced Pattis to ante up and request combat duty. He joins Davis' crew just in time for what will turn out to be a very dangerous mission...

Aerial Gunner is in the public domain, allowing me to include the movie in its entirety at the bottom of this post. I think its worth your time to watch it, but be aware of its faults. And remember--if you don't have my impeccable taste and don't find the gunnery school sequences as interesting as I do--then you might get a bit bored.

I'm a farmer. If I lose my farm there must be a reason for it. The sacrifice of one poor village - what will it accomplish?

Edge of Darkness (1942) is a film that can be downright heartbreaking at times.

It’s set in a small fishing village in occupied Norway. The people are just people—they fish, work in the cannery or run small shops. They want to resist the Nazis, but don’t have the resources to do anything beyond a few minor acts of sabotage. There are some—such as the town doctor played by Walter Huston—who just want to wait it out and avoid getting everyone unnecessarily killed.

Then they learn that the British will be smuggling in guns and ammo. The plan is to arm a number of villages along the Norwegian coast, then launch a general uprising. But this must be done according to plan. The villagers must wait until the right moment before they fight.

But several acts of brutality by the Germans might anger them enough to rise up too soon.

What makes all this work so well—to resonate with so much effective emotion—is how average and normal the villagers are. Their leader is a fisherman played by Errol Flynn and he’s not average, of course. Whenever Flynn is on the screen—no matter when and where the movie is set—you always expect a sword fight to break out at any moment.

But that works fine in context to the film—he’s the leader because he’s above average. But everyone else is just normal, everyday guys and gals who are essentially now living in a hell on earth. They don’t look and act like soldiers—they look and act like fisherman and shopkeepers who are struggling to figure out what they should do next.

There’s a scene in which most of the townspeople are meeting in church. The pastor is on the pulpit, making it look like they’re having a regular church service if a German looks in. But a man sitting in one of the pews is doing the talking, telling them about a village that rose up against the Nazis and was wiped out.

So what should they do? One man thinks it’s always wrong to kill. Others think that fighting would be senseless and only get their families killed. Others think they must fight no matter what, but when and how to fight is open to further debate.

This is a war-time film, so in the end it takes the side of those who want to fight. And, of course, history has justified this—the irony being that the Nazis turned out to be even more brutal than they were portrayed in propaganda films such as this.

But during that church scene, everyone is given their say. There’s no derision or condemnation of those who don’t want to fight. The film seems to understand how difficult a decision this is for the townspeople—how much courage it would take to pick up a weapon and charge a machine gun nest full of trained soldiers. Edge of Darkness represents people who want a free society and it remembers that in such a society people are allowed to have different opinions and debate with each other.

There’s not a lot of action in the film until the climax—the film effectively uses character moments to help build up the tension. The running time is just under two hours, but the various characters all get sufficient time for us to get to know them and to like them.

Little moments of dialogue are used with laser-like precision to define individual characters. During the climatic battle, for instance, a maid who has always been deferential to her employer is told that the women and children are being evacuated to England. “The women with children are going,” she replies. “I’m staying to fight.”   Then she adds a modest apology for speaking above her social station. But, by golly, she stays and fights.

The film does such a great job of getting us to like the villagers that the climatic battle is actually a little painful to watch. There’s no punches pulled here—people we’ve gotten to know and like are being killed and we actually hate it when we watch them die.

I have a real love for the war-time films. I recognize them as propaganda as well as entertainment, but I think the message they preached about confronting evil is a moral and still important one. Edge of Darkness is one of the best of these because it is very intelligent and very, very human in the way it makes its point.

BOGIE AT WAR

I've just published another e-book. Bogie at War covers the seven films made just before or during World War II in which a character played by Bogart goes up against the Axis. I've written it mostly to celebrate the themes of self-sacrifice, service to others and confronting evil that run so strongly through most of these films.

It's exclusive for the Kindle or the (free) Kindle app--I did that so that it's also available to borrow for free if you're an Amazon Prime member. It's a mere .99 cents to purchase, though. A small price for a work by a true genius such as myself.