OVP: So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

Film: So Proudly We Hail! (1943)

Stars: Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, George Reeves, Sonny Tufts

Director: Mark Sandrich

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Supporting Actress-Paulette Goddard, Visual Effects, Original Screenplay, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Watching films made during World War II about World War II is such a strange situation.  This isn't a unique reality-films have been made during wartime about those wartimes in years since, particularly the wars in Afghanistan & Iraq (from an American perspective), but World War II has such finite dates & involves so many global players that watching those films during the war, about a war that the actors & filmmakers don't know the ending to is a bit surreal.  This is the case for So Proudly We Hail, a movie about American nurses who serve in the Philippines at the commencement of the war, leading up to the eventual surrender in the islands (and the Bataan Death March).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told largely in flashback, as the women, including Joan (Goddard), try to instruct the captain of the ship they've been rescued from why Janet (Colbert) is unable to speak & is basically catatonic.  In the flashback, the women talk about the harshness of wartime life, but also about their friendships and romances.  Both Joan & Janet fall in love, the former with a lug of a soldier nicknamed Kansas (Tufts), and the latter with Lt. John Summers (Reeves), a romance that threatens her being courtmartialed.  Along the way they meet another lieutenant, Olivia (Lake) who is scarred from the war & the death of her fiancé, which eventually bonds her to the other girls once she admits the pain she's been going through.  We eventually learn that Janet is haunted by how she left behind John, whom she marries in a rush as they are evacuating, but gets some assurance that he could be alive, and they'll have the farm they always dreamed of in America, thus making her speak again.

So Proudly We Hail is not a good movie (though it's not horrendous-two stars seems more than fitting).  The film is overlong, and it's pretty sappy.  I am a relatively consistent Claudette Colbert fan, but this isn't much for me.  Colbert is melodramatic & weirdly bad in this film.  Her breakdown on the dock is cringe-y, and her relationship with Reeves makes grounding her character difficult to do.  She plays her role as a boring saint (critics of her may claim she does this too often which I don't agree with), and the anchor of having a lead that doesn't fit the film makes the  movie kind of a drag.

Strangely, it's Veronica Lake, an actress I find fascinating (but is nowhere near the talent of Colbert) that totally nails her small part, and probably would've made the worthiest nomination of the bunch.  Her racist soldier suffering from PTSD after the death of her fiancé during the Pearl Harbor attacks ultimately cannot kill Japanese patients like she wants, and has to (in a gorgeous scene where she lets her down for the only time in the film, suddenly becoming VERONICA LAKE) sacrifice herself in order to save the rest of the nurses.

Instead it was Paulette Goddard who won the Oscar nomination for this film, the only one in her career and though Lake's the better of the two (for my money), it's easy to see why they went with Goddard as she breathes some oxygen into an otherwise dour movie.  She's terrific, flirting with Tufts repeatedly (they have a great rapport), and toes the line between man-hungry & dismissive of men (since they always pay attention to her).  She doesn't get any of the big scenes like Lake does, but she's energy & that's more than welcome.

Before we go, the film received two more nominations I should note.  The Cinematography is big, but not all that outstanding.  The Visual Effects are also big (the giant shots of the boats is gorgeous, and the one cinematography moment that feels fitting of the nomination), but I don't know that they're all that noteworthy compared to other things that we had seen before.  All-in-all, other than Goddard none of these nominations feel all-that-earned, and like they were rewarding the concept of these brave women more than the movie that housed them.