This is a 'you hadda be there' picture. In 1942 this would have been one to see: the re-teaming of Clark Gable and Lana Turner after their success in HONKY TONK and Gable's first picture to be released after the death of his wife Carole Lombard. It was also his last picture before enlisting, so all stateside moviegoers knew it would be their final Gable film for the duration of WWII. And since her elopement and subsequent divorce from Artie Shaw in 1940, Turner was an ongoing tabloid headline. I guess with so many surefire elements, MGM didn't think it had to make a good movie too.
This is a 'love' triangle between three journalists, unfolding just before and just after Pearl Harbor. But since Gable and Turner make up two of the three points, there's no doubt about who will wind up with the girl. Yet we must suffer many contrived scenes during which two parts of the triangle argue tediously about the absent third. Finally, war breaks out and all debts are paid during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines,
Beginning with an ill-judged opening comic scene, right through to the rousing, patriotic ending in the midst of the noise and muck of war, nothing in this picture makes sense, fits together or works satisfyingly. It lurches clumsily from comedy to romance to comedy to action picture, as if each sequence was meant for a separate film. SOMEWHERE I'LL FIND YOU gives lie to the idea that movies from the classic period always had coherent stories.
Gable is reassuringly gruff and virile but he does seem less energetic and committed to the part than usual, and a couple of his closeups suggest the studio was exploiting his grief over Lombard, assuming that's what audiences would see in his face. Turner is livelier and her scenes with Gable are beautifully shot but never erotic. As Gable's younger brother, Robert Sterling is good-looking and lends able support and it isn't his fault that he and Gable never seem related. That was more Gable's job and he botched it. As a fast-talking B-girl, Patricia Dane is self-conscious but she makes such an impression in her two scenes and is so well-dressed and photographed that you wonder why you haven't seen more of her. You also wonder who she may have been seeing in the Front Office to get such a break. Best buddies (and rumored lovers) Van Johnson and Keenan Wynn have small parts near the end, and a few Asian actors are given sympathetic bits in the last quarter. But this movie squanders nearly every opportunity it had.
