Tender Comrade

Ok, this movie IS dated but so were most of the films made during the WWII. This is not a major earthshaking film, just a nice little movie. Even if it gets a little preachy.

Ginger Rogers is more muted in this role, not really one of her strongest performances, but she is good. Robert Ryan, her husband in the film, is actually playing a NICE guy here. This film also includes Ruth Hussey, Kim Hunter, Patricia Collinge and Jane Darnell. They are never really used to a great advantage here.

The story is simple enough. These women were left behind by their men who went of to war. They move in together to share expenses and responsibility. They try to run the house democratically but run into problems. If you are looking for a nice little movie to watch, this can be that movie. I do have this in my video collection and have watched it about 3 times.

Ginger Rogers was a much better actress than Dalton Trumbo was a writer (and she had much prettier legs).

In fact, in "Tender Comrade," Trumbo presents us with a puzzle: How could a writer responsible for so much hokey, amateurish dialogue (noted by other reviewers) ever get a reputation as being a great or even a good writer? I admit there were two bright spots in "Tender Comrade" that deserve appreciation for the writer: near the beginning, when two strangers comfort each other as their loved ones depart for the war, and when one character tells another how her marriage "proposal" came about.

Trumbo, though, being Trumbo later has a silly bit when Jo refers to the socialist plan the group adopts ("from each according to her ability …") as "democracy," further demonstrating his confusing of two different and distinct applications as the same.

"Democracy" is a more or less political term describing how leaders are chosen (if, for some reason, anyone wants leaders), and "socialism" is a more or less economic term and more or less philosophical term describing how material goods are more or less shared – distributed, anyway. ("Socialism" means government ownership of the means of production, to be more pedantic.) There was nothing wrong with the democratically decided idea of voluntary communalism among the housemates, but if a viewer knows Trumbo's predilection for collectivism – at least for others, though not so much for himself – the whole scene is discomfiting.

(An excellent book that portrays Trumbo and others, and shows the dichotomy between what they preached, including sometimes in their scripts, and how they lived is "Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s" by Lloyd Billingsley. It is probably the best book yet on that era. Read especially about Trumbo and his mansion and the lavish parties he loved to throw, even during the times the soldiers were dying.)

Jo's last monologue went on for too long, and really didn't say much – it was apparently another failed attempt by Trumbo at being profound and dramatic.

But Ginger Rogers said a lot, even with Trumbo's words. She was a much, much better actress than she seems to be generally regarded. She was much, much more than a great dancer.

With all my complaints about Trumbo, his moronic politics, the lame plot, and his poor writing, still this is a pretty good movie.

It brings back, though not especially well, a particular time in American history.

One of the great ironies of that era: Trumbo waxed indignant about the Nazis and the war they instigated. Yet it is the politics of Trumbo and the other collectivists, Nazis and Communists and other kinds of socialists and fascists, that together created the climate that allowed the unmitigated horrors of World War II.

The collectivist notions that people are not sovereign individuals but are cogs in the machinery of the state, that they must obey their masters, that they must cheerfully march off to war, to kill and/or be killed, that led to the tens of millions of deaths.

Trumbo must share the blame for that evil. He was a vehement proponent of that vicious nonsense.

Still, the cast overcomes the weaknesses of the script. If you watch it on Turner Classic Movies, ignore Robert Osborne's ignorant introduction and closing comments, and concentrate on the people, on their concerns and their efforts at overcoming adversity, on how they deal with their menfolks' being in harm's way, on their daily difficulties, including rationing.

"Tender Comrade" is worth watching.

"Tender Comrade" was the only film made during the second world war showing what it was like to be a war bride. It just about covers every detail of home life during this time period, such as rationing booklets, war plant jobs, friendships, worries, "not to talk about troop movements" in public and everything a war bride had to deal with. I'm sure one cam complain about dialog, scripts, camera angles, etcetera, but life wasn't perfect and this film recreates life during a time when "politically incorrect" was not mandatory. People actually talked like that then. They dressed like that, lived like that. This film is as close to factual representation of a war bride as anyone ever got and I, for one, am thankful it was filmed and still lives on. Everyone seems to remember the soldier, but not so much about what their wives, mothers, sisters and daughters had to endure while being left behind to wait for their return. Thank you, Mr. Dymytryk.

This is the type of movie for which the fast-forward function was invented, as parts of this movie have both fine writing and fine acting, and other parts are dreadful propaganda. The story is simple. Ginger Rogers, husband to soldier Robert Ryan, convinces her other pals working at the war plant to move in together, and pool their assets. The story of Robert Ryan and Ginger is told through flashbacks, scattered randomly through the tale of how five working women manage to live together, even when spouting impossible dialog at each other.

The scenes between Rogers and Ryan are well-written and finely acted. Trumbo and the actors capture (most unusually for almost any movie) how a generally happy marriage works and how a quarrel might develop. Watch the scenes where these two are together. They are (mostly) free of the propaganda that does not age well.

The rest of the movie. Well, the characters are types and serve as mouthpieces for the "We must sacrifice for the war effort" line being sold by the movie. If one is looking for preposterous moments of the cinema, one can flip forward to the scene where our group home's housekeeper gets in a rage because the butcher slipped an extra piece of bacon in the order. (Followed by a confession of hoarding by one of the girls in the house. Followed by an anti-foreigner tirade by the most ethically challenged of the group residents.) There is some decent 'ol fashioned movie rhetoric in this part, but, mostly, this section is hokum.

... but it was part of what got director Edward Dmytryk and writer Dalton Trumbo in trouble with HUAC in the early 50s when this film was considered Communist propaganda.

Four war wives who work in a munitions plant decide that if they pool their salaries and resources that instead of four individual run down rooms for rent that they can rent one spacious house with a bedroom for each, a kitchen, a living room, and a housekeeper. They sell one of the two cars they have between them and use the money to fix up the one remaining car and share it. Apparently this is Communism. Let's just ignore the fact that, at the time, movies were being made that were loaded with pro Russian propaganda because the Americans needed the Russians in the war effort. That was then this is now, as they say.

Other than that, it treads pretty traditional wartime material. One wife (Ruth Hussey) was a bit of a good time girl before the war and rather resents the fact that her good-time husband joined the navy before Pearl Harbor even happened. Another (Kim Hunter) got married on the spur of the moment and had to see her husband off that afternoon. Another (Patricia Collinge) has both a son and a husband in the war.

The central figure, though, is war wife Jo Jones (Ginger Rogers), and most of the film is about her relationship with her soldier/husband Chris (Robert Ryan) before the war as she flashes back to various scenes from their marriage. This part of the film uses a strange device. Whenever there is a scene in which Jo reminisces about Chris, the scene switches to a shot of the two of them in the distance, holding hands with clouds surrounding them, like they are in heaven, before launching into the flashback.

This gets pretty sentimental at times, and Ginger verges on hamming it up, but it did hold my interest for the rather long running time and is a splendid time capsule of the war years.