OVP: They Were Expendable (1945)

Film: They Were Expendable (1945)

Stars: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Recording, Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

All right, I'm aware I skipped the first week of Ward Bond (in the US last weekend was Labor Day and I had family in town & in the year of 2022 we focus on spending time with loved ones at the expense of our responsibilities-that's just the rules), but we won't be skimping on him today, as we're going to do our first ever double-feature so that he gets a full month of movies.  As a result, we're going to talk about a huge chapter of Ward Bond's career in the next few hours.  Bond started as a character actor, and largely stayed there.  Working in B-Grade films in the early 1930's, he did eventually graduate to A-Grade pictures, but almost always as a random "friend of the hero" or a villain of some sorts.  I watched They Were Expendable with my parents last weekend while they were in town, and at one point my mom said "why does he look so familiar?" and it's because Bond's real claim to fame is the breadth of his filmography, and just how many movies he's made.  Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers...he is somehow in all of these landmark classics, but always as a bit player or side part.  I have seen all of these movies so I can't watch them for this project, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them as we kick off our month devoted to Bond, as he's a true character actor, though one who is familiar to virtually any person who has ever watched a classic film.

(Spoilers Ahead) Made in the waning days of World War II, They Were Expendable is the story of a team of men who command a squadron of US Navy PT Boats in the South Pacific.  Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Montgomery) is sure that they will be an asset to the navy, but his commanding officers remain skeptical, and his friend Lt. JG "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) is hoping to get his own command, and nearly goes for it when Pearl Harbor is bombed, throwing his entire world into chaos.  The film that follows shows the divergent paths these two men's careers take, with Brick becoming a war hero, his PT boat experience used to sink a Japanese cruiser, while Rusty (sidelined with blood poisoning) falls in love with a nurse named Sandy (Reed) on land, their romance doomed to failure both because it's impossible to fall into a longterm relationship while at war and because the evacuation of Bataan leaves Sandy behind, certain to die in the process.

This is where the title comes from, and where the most powerful scene in the movie is.  The war is not subtle about the "have's and have not's" of battle, with a large section of the film's middle devoted to the evacuation of General MacArthur into Australia while men around him perish to get him there.  The final scenes of the movie show that Brick & Rusty escape, but others, like Chief Mulcahey (Bond, who has a small part that is most notable for him crooning to Donna Reed through an open window...which he also more famously did in It's a Wonderful Life) are left to die.  Brick & Rusty are too valuable to the war effort to be left behind, even if the unmarried Rusty tries to switch with one of the married infantryman when there are not enough seats in the end of the movie.  It's a killer, rough ending particularly in an era where most WWII films were just populist propaganda, and on top of astounding cinematography and unreal visual effects, a really great forgotten epic.

The film was a critically-important one in the career of John Wayne, which I'd be remiss to not mention before we leave.  Wayne is the most famous WWII Hollywood draft dodger less because he was the only one to do it, and more because Wayne's onscreen persona frequently had him wearing a military uniform, thus making an odd juxtaposition to a man who never actually served.  This came to a head when director John Ford would berate Wayne, his longtime friend whom he thought a coward for skipping out on his patriotic duty, in front of the entire cast & crew of They Were Expendable.  Particularly when juxtaposed with his fellow leading man Robert Montgomery (who had been an ambulance driver at Dunkirk and rose to the level of lieutenant commander in the US Navy), Wayne made for easy mockery by Ford, and it took Montgomery eventually stepping in for the two men to finally make peace.  They would do so in the coming years alongside our star Ward Bond, who would make multiple movies with Ford & Wayne, one of which we'll discuss next week.