Tender Comrade

Jo Jones (Ginger Rogers) is heartbroken watching her husband Chris Jones (Robert Ryan) go off to war. She goes to work at an aircraft plant. She befriends fellow workers Doris Dumbrowski (Kim Hunter), Barbara Thomas (Ruth Hussey), and Helen Stacey (Patricia Collinge). They decide to rent a house together.

The war propaganda is obvious and completely expected. There isn't anything that compelling. They have made each lady do something different. The German housemaid gives voice to all the underlying politics and warnings from Europe. The flashbacks are hit and miss. A better use of the time could be Chris writing letters from the war. Maybe it could show him being heroic. That would be great war propaganda. Barbara hearing about the Yorktown sinking is probably the most compelling moment. The most compelling Hollywood history has to do with the writer Dalton Trumbo who would fall victim to the Red Scare.

... 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.

I found it an interesting movie because I was just old enough to be aware of what was what during the war years. Rationing, shortages, worrying about husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, etc. who were overseas fighting. It may seem "hokey" or outdated to those under thirty or forty, but it's fairly representative of what life was like. I agree with a previous commentator - Dalton Trumbo is/was a vastly over-rated writer, in fact if it hadn't been for the fact that he was "black-listed" I doubt if he would be remembered, let alone lionized as he is today. A classic case of creating a martyr. He's heavy handed and lacks subtlety. His mediocre writing is usually compensated for by the talent of the players or directors. View it with a mindset that allows for the ethos of the period and I think you will find it entertaining. Ginger Rogers is almost always terrific, and this movie is no exception.

I disagree with the goof that Robert Ryan is not whistling when coming through the laundry. In close examination, you hear the whistling, see his feet walking toward the laundry line. Then see his face, lips slightly puckered, he draws a breath and continues, just through his lips, but without his lips all bunched up. It's of course possible to whistle this way. I do it all the time!

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.