Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Sunday, December 14, 2008




Stateside Theatres Of War







There’s nothing like the urgency you get from World War Two films made during that conflict. Imagine how they played to audiences still in doubt as to its outcome. Whatever tension was generated on screen was redoubled by real-life anxiety over who’d win or lose. Were the likes of Flying Tigers and Across The Pacific there as much for reassurance as escape? Looking back from our comfortable distance makes it easy to wax superior over cliches and wrong then and wrong now attitudes, but how many films since have confronted such an imperative, with the very survival of democracy hanging in the balance? I’d have sure looked to Bogart and John Wayne as counterweights to headlines appearing in 1942, a year mostly bleak for the Allies. Theatres were a refuge that promised ultimate victory with a necessary caution that getting there would be rough and demand sacrifice. Unlike dreamscapes of the thirties, wartime movie houses were recruitment and basic training sites for home-fronters anxious (or not) to do their civilian part. You ran a gauntlet of war bond selling booths positioned in most lobbies. Kids rolled discarded tires to scrap drives showmen sponsored. There was no more prominent community center than a theatre in small towns, and no experience so intense as moviegoing with stakes this high. Content of newsreels was trumpeted in newspaper ads. Captured Jap Footage or Fall Of Corregidor were as much lures as features, even double ones. It was vital in early days of war to give the impression we were whipping the Japanese even as they were actually creaming us. For whatever pleasures are had watching Flying Tigers and Across The Pacific, it’s all so much quicksilver compared with excitement and encouragement they provided to 1942 patrons far more in need of it than we’ll (hopefully) ever be.















Calendars are the stuff of high drama in both Flying Tigers and Across The Pacific. A date shown close-up assured gasps of recognition and grim foreknowledge of dreadful things about to happen. Timeliness was advantage for war stories. Set the action in months just previous and features became an extension of newsreels preceding them, a kind of seamless narrative lots more realistic than movies had been before. Flying Tigers was shot during May-July 1942 and released in October. It told of Americans volunteering to help the Chinese rout Japanese oppressors in the air. Their war become ours when a third act set-piece shows John Wayne and others listening to President Roosevelt declare war just after Pearl Harbor. Action stops for this and we linger over troubled expressions as the speech is heard in its near-entirety. I’m betting very little popcorn went into mouths as the President spoke and Wayne reacted. Flying Tigers was barely rejiggered from aerial dramas Howard Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings and Ceiling Zero) and others had done, though they lacked blood-quickening propaganda values furnished by a real-life war. Familiar narrative devices of reckless pilots and cowardice aloft were buttressed by opponents foreign, sinister, and since Pearl Harbor, easy to hate. Never had the "other" exhibited such otherness. Japanese pilots in Flying Tigers are subhuman and lethal. They wear caps with mangy fur linings. When shot down (often), they clutch throats and upchuck blood (imagine post-December 7 cheering at that!). Ads shown here are first-run and mince few words as to Flying Tigers’ propaganda mission --- To Blast to Bloody, Burning Hell The Sneaking Japs Who Unleashed Their Terror On The World. Patrons might indeed have benefited by issuance of Valium tablets with their concessions for appeals so forceful as this!












































Flying Tigers was the only feature in 1942’s top twenty not produced by a major studio. Small-timer Republic had never had product so grand, or timely, as this to sell. Budget was set at $264,384, but negative costs ran to $397,690. The company accustomed to flat rates for its westerns and serials now demanded 35% for Flying Tigers. They’d not have gotten such terms but for John Wayne, now a bonafide "A" star and bound by a Republic contract. You can look at this show and those he did before it and know that Wayne’s essential screen character was born in Flying Tigers. He’s fully formed at last after years in rough draft. No longer the uncertain youth of Stagecoach and Seven Sinners, but a leader of men and warrior of unquestioned judgment. Wayne from this point would remain the sober alternative to recruits brash and green, exemplified in Flying Tigers by John Carroll as go-it-alone hotshot pilot based on the old Cagney model discredited now in a war demanding team effort. To be exemplary in battle meant pitching in for the good of all. One-man bands played mostly in graveyards. Wayne was fortunate for age advantage promoting him to onscreen officer status and roles better suited to underplaying he was best at. It’s efforts of a John Carroll, all smirk and acrobatic eyebrows, that emphasize Wayne’s cooler hand and firmer grip on his audience. As an actor, he could finally benefit for doing less. While Wayne developed his soundstage combatant, eager players like Carroll and James Craig over at MGM followed examples soon to be outmoded, patterning themselves on Clark Gable, the latter service-bound as were many pre-war first-teamers. Wayne knew his career turned upon opportunities he might seize while these rivals served. The decision to stay out of the war probably spared him the afterward fate of many who’d enlisted short of firming up stardom.















































Across The Pacific, if not heralding the arrival of Humphrey Bogart as romantic leading man, at least gave him recognition as such after years of varied service to criminal enterprise and "B" leads onscreen. Jack Warner saw ATP and wired home that his studio finally had its own Clark Gable in Bogart, little realizing that his asset was one of greater longevity than he’d suspect. Bogart was like Wayne in shaping a hero for the war that would sustain beyond its conclusion and help redefine masculine codes for a generation to come. He’s more believable for being less fully committed than others who lay down sacrifice without question. Bogart cashiered from the service seems not an unlikely premise. His turning out to be working undercover is frankly less plausible. Despite the several war-themed films they did together, Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet’s characters seem always to function as men without countries, at most figures without loyalty except to themselves. The template established by The Maltese Falcon died hard, but the conversion of self-server Bogart to an Allied calling made hits like Casablanca possible. His patriotic fervor seemed more an informed choice than those of guileless leading men suiting up at the bugle’s first call, but again, it was Bogart’s age and presumed maturity that made his character’s choices more reasoned ones. Across The Pacific combines that equivocation with a playful undermining of the straightforward Know Your Enemy message put forth by Flying Tigers and simpler-minded Jap-slappers. Here we have Sydney Greenstreet as jovial, if untrustworthy, proponent of oriental culture given legitimacy by his appreciation of it. A judo exhibition in Across The Pacific amounts to endorsement of that art as superior to defense tactics of our own. For all the film’s recognition of a cunning and formidable enemy, Across the Pacific’s promotion relied on Yellow Peril devices and a by-now familiar revenge theme (I’ve Been Hoarding This Sock Since December 7, says Bogart in poster art). Its September release brought domestic rentals of $1.3 million against negative costs of $576,000, with foreign an additional $994,000. Final profits of $1.1 million were the largest yet for a Bogart vehicle.

4 Comments:

Blogger James Corry said...

You know John, another WWII propaganda film which has just disappeared for over 40 years is Monogram's "China's Little Devils." Having grown up in L.A. I used to watch it on TV, then it suddenly vanished....However, TCM has a synopsis of it on their website, which gives me hope that it might show up on that channel one day. It had an impressive cast (Harry Carey and Paul Kelly) and a musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin (!) Being a Monogram picture it would seem as if Warners would now own it......This is a film which should be re-discovered.

Best,

Jame Corry

11:19 PM  
Blogger John McElwee said...

James, I'd heard of "China's Little Devils", but never saw it, and had no idea that it had a Tiomkin score. Like you, I assume Warners owns the negative. Anyone know for sure?

5:19 AM  
Blogger Kevin K. said...

By the time I was 12, I'd learned more about World War II from movies like these -- and the 3 Stooges shorts, for that matter -- than my daughter has in school. And she's in 7th grade.

8:44 AM  
Blogger Michael J. Hayde said...

Can anyone imagine seeing a "Remember 9/11 - Keep 'Em Dying" poster at the local multiplex? It's troubling to think that all that "Sink the Jap" propaganda nourished the country's will to win. Is the lack of the same tactic today the reason why most of the nation lost its stomach for the current battle after the first year? Do we REQUIRE such propaganda to win a war? I hope not.

My father-in-law, who passed away in July, was Japanese-American. He grew up in California of a family of farmers, and during the war they were all packed off to an internment camp. He was never bitter about it. As an adult, he worked for the government that put him in that camp, and he was a committed conservative for as long as I knew him (which isn't to say he didn't question the stupidity of some of our leaders, because he sure did).

Knowing him was a great education for me: just because self-styled "experts" tell us that certain events in our history were tragic, humiliating and unconscionable doesn't mean that the people who lived through them will agree.

11:32 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024