Cry 'Havoc'

As a patriotic exercise in morale rising this film does a good job even though it is downbeat but as an opportunity to see an amazing group of actresses gathered together it can't be beat.

With its almost totally female cast, a very young Robert Mitchum just starting out is in and out of the picture in about a minute, this is a rare bird indeed. It's closest match would be The Women but unlike that high comedy cat fest this is a grim examination of the bravery of a group of dedicated nurses and volunteers during the seize of Bataan.

All the women are terrific but a few stand out. The great Margaret Sullavan in her second to last feature is fantastic as the outwardly tough nurse Smitty who is hiding many secrets. Ann Sothern and Joan Blondell are wisecracking experts and even under these tough conditions manage to brighten their scenes with plenty of snap. Two of the best character actresses the movies ever had, Fay Bainter and Connie Gilchrist, don't have much too do but inject their special touch into their scenes.

Each actress gets some type of spotlight moment and that makes this a memorable exercise. While surely actual field hospitals are much tougher than the one shown here the film still doesn't scrimp and try to make this seem glamorous in any way. These women are going through hell and the ending leaves little doubt that their struggles are far from over but that their courage helped to win the war. A fine piece of entertainment.

Cry Havoc was based on a play by Allan Kenward which the Shuberts produced on Broadway and ran for a grand total of 11 performances over the Christmas/New Year's days of 1942-43. But what flops on Broadway can sometimes be a great success on screen and vice versa.

In this case the subject matter had already been thoroughly covered in the Paramount film So Proudly We Hail and Cry Havoc runs a distinct second to that film. Like the Paramount film, Cry Havoc deals with nurses in the Phillipines after Pearl Harbor and their experiences during the Japanese attack.

Margaret Sullavan was fulfilling the terms of an MGM contract with this movie. Afterwards she would concentrate on the stage and would only do one more film years later, No Sad Songs For Me. She plays the no nonsense army nurse with several new charges rushed up to the Bataan front among them Joan Blondell and Ann Sothern. Fay Bainter played Sullavan's superior and she also was winding up her MGM contract as well.

There are no substantial male roles in this film, they're seen briefly in fighting roles and of course as casualties. If you don't blink you'll see Robert Mitchum utter a couple of words and then die. Sullavan and Sothern have a rivalry going over an unseen army lieutenant.

In fact on the set they had a rivalry going as well. According to a recent biography of Margaret Sullavan, she and Sothern did not get along so their scenes together had some real bite. Sullavan felt that Sothern was slipping into her popular Maisie character for which she was doing a B picture series for MGM.

Cry Havoc should be seen because anything that has Margaret Sullavan should be seen as she left us way too few films for posterity. But this really is quite inferior to So Proudly We Hail.

WWII curiosity with -an all female cast, while those men who do briefly appear are wounded servicemen dependent on the women. The girls are nurses in a field hospital in the Phillipines just as the islands are falling to the Japanese. They're volunteers recruited at the last minute as the bombs are falling. So we wonder how well these comely civilians in their mascara and lipstick will perform under extreme battlefield conditions.

Good cast. But somehow the movie doesn't live up to the material's potential. As I see it, the problem lies with director Thorpe who films the dramatics from an impersonal distance as if it were still the stage play from which the movie was adapted. With the basically single set where the girls live, there's not much room to move about. So when the bombs fall or one of the girls freaks out, close-ups of personal reactions are needed, not a continuing group scene that disperses the emotion. There's a ton of dramatic material to engage with here, but too much is allowed to impersonally slip by.

Nonetheless, it is an entertaining cast, especially the two dames, Blondell and Sothern. They're natural rivals with their sassy wisecracking that keep the audience amused amid the grimness. Sullavan with her husky voice and domineering demeanor makes an unusual screen presence, as does the rail-thin, sharply intelligent Marsha Hunt. I just wish the Japanese planes had let Blondell finish her mock striptease.

The play was put together in 1942, the war's darkest period. This 1943 movie reflects many of these somber prospects, and is thus of some historical interest. Clearly, the purpose is to show that the girls can rise to wartime challenge as well as the boys, and by focusing on the women, we know the spirit comes from them and not from some male overseer. This is one of the few WWII films that really had me guessing about the ending. As it turns out, I failed. Nonetheless, there's enough suspense and good acting to make up for the parts that now (perhaps thankfully) seem dated and distant.

Nurses, trained and un-, provide first aid and feminine comfort in a ravaged section of the Bataan front in MGM's 1943 filming of a 1942 stage flop. It's effectively adapted by Paul Osborn, and directed a bit stodgily by Richard Thorpe, who was one of Metro's longest-lasting and least-interesting contractees. It's stagy, limited mainly to the no-frills living quarters of the nurses, and, despite some snazzy quips coming from Ann Sothern and Joan Blondell and the comic-relief ditherings of Diana Lewis (who later married William Powell), a ditzy Southern blonde, pretty bleak. Margaret Sullavan is the no-nonsense workaholic, under commander Fay Bainter, and among several other worthy actresses, there's the always-worth-seeing Marsha Hunt, plus Heather Angel and Ella Raines. It's not subtle, and the main conflict, with Ann getting flirty with Maggie's man, feels a little inconsequential amid all the dying soldiers and bombs. But it's certainly effective propaganda, and the ending, a downbeat one, is a surprise.

The context of this film is certainly interesting, even for a WWII film. In April, 1942, a very large American force surrendered to the Japanese at the end of the Battle of Bataan in the Philippines, thus precipitating the Bataan Death March, a Japanese war crime. The play that formed the basis for this film was written in September, 1942, and it tells the story from another angle, that of a group of American nurses in the area. However, the Death March had not been disclosed to the American public until January, 1944, after this movie was made and released, and as such, it focuses just on the doomed, lost cause that resulted in a massive surrender. Had the film been made after January 1944, it's a safe bet that the Japanese would have been depicted very differently at the end, given the rage in America over hearing about the atrocities.

The film is dominated by a practically all-female cast, but if you're looking for something that is authentically from a woman's perspective and by today's standards, this ain't it. There's a lot of pithy comments about interactions with soldiers, a silly love triangle with an unseen male officer at the center of the film, and subplots like the finding of a piece of soap leading to bathing and frolicking in a lake. I chalk all this up to trying to lighten a pretty dark story, which was a big American loss, and presumably in there to boost the morale of those watching it.

On the other hand, it's more than a little sobering for me to see a generation looking at itself and saying this is what we're going through, a life and death struggle with nations that are truly acting as evil agents in the world, and we must keep up our spirits. Joan Blondell is great in scenes with wounded or dying soldiers, and it's touching when the nurses categorize a bunch of belongings from the dead, tossing bag after bag of them into a pile. There is a sense of being trapped and doomed, with a lack of medicine and supply shipments bombed. One of them articulates the magnitude of the war, and another provides a good description of the island's strategic importance, making the case that the stand the Allied forces made was important to slow down the Japanese spread across the Pacific. I liked the topical little touches, such as the whistling and humming of the song 'Blues in the Night,' and the snappy dialogue from Ann Sothern, who turns in a strong performance. It's not a great film or even a very good film, but for another window into the period, the setting, and Blondell and Sothern, I found it enjoyable.

Favorite quote: What did you do in burlesque? Um. You know what you do to a banana before you eat it? Well, uh, I do it to music.