Daily Archives: January 7, 2015

Pride of the Marines
Directed by Delmer Daves
Written by Albert Malz and Marvin Borowsky from a novel by Roger Butterfield
1945/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Al Schmid: Just for luck, maybe the ship’ll come in tomorrow with some mail on it.

Lee Diamond: Why is it that everything good is always gonna happen tomorrow?[/box]

This didn’t quite measure up to my expectations after seeing Garfield top-billed but it’s not bad by any means.  It’s mostly a coming home story but the one combat sequence is really the highlight.

Al Schmid (Garfield) is an ordinary Joe and factory worker.  He’s also a confirmed bachelor and ever wary of his landlady’s efforts to matchmake.  So he is deeply suspicious when the lady invites her friend, an alleged great bowler, to her birthday dinner.  Even though the friend turns out to be Ruth Hartley, a woman as beautiful as Eleanor Parker who plays her, Al treats her pretty shamefully.  But one thing leads to another and Ruth proves herself to be a ready companion for hunting and fishing, Al’s two passions, and they fall in love.

Then Pearl Harbor is attacked.  Al enlists in the Marines.  Before setting off for boot camp he attempts to set Ruth free but thinks better of it at the last minute.  After he is on Guadalcanal one of his great regrets will be not marrying her.

But Guadalcanal does not give Al much opportunity to ponder such things.  He is a machine gun operator stuck in a fox hole with two buddies and a horde of Japanese calling out “Marine, tonight you die” through the darkness.  When they attack, the Marines are clearly scared out of their wits.  One gets killed quickly and another, Al’s buddy Lee (Dane Clark), is badly wounded.  Somehow the three stave off the attack.  But everything culminates in a well-aimed grenade which robs Al of his sight.

Back in the States, Al refuses to write to Ruth until he can have the operation that he is convinced will restore his sight.  When the operation is not successful, Al becomes despondent, refuses to participate in his rehabilitation, and wants to break it off with Ruth. The rest of the story deals with Al’s extremely reluctant adjustment to the very real possibility that he will be totally blind.

This is an OK movie.  I thought the sequence on Guadalcanal was extremely effective.  It seems to me nighttime combat scenes work particularly well for some reason.  The heckling and shouts of Bonzai from the enemy made it seem eerily scary and real.  The melodrama is not up to the combat but was pretty good.  I could have done without the last minute of the film.

Pride of the Marines received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay.

Trailer

Isle of the Dead
Directed by Mark Robson
Written by Ardel Wray
1945/USA
RKO Radio Pictures
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Thea: Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.[/box]

Auteur producer Val Lewton takes this title to ask the question:  Who is the scarier, the vampire or those who believe in him?  A little too scattered to rank with the best of his work but graced by a rare fairly sympathetic role for Boris Karloff.

Gen. Nikolas Pherides is a strict taskmaster, nicknamed The Watchdog.  His first task is to execute one of his friends for a lapse by his troops.  An American journalist questions the good general’s methods but not so as to not accept an offer to visit the island graveyard of the general’s dead wife.

When they arrive, Pherides discovers all the caskets in the tomb of his wife have been emptied.  The two come upon a house where a superstitious local woman tells them the bodies were burned because one of them was evil.  This woman strongly believes in the legend of the Vorvolaka, a sort of female vampire.  Furthermore, she believes that Thea, a young woman caring for the invalid wife of the British Consul, is one.

To make matters worse, one of the guests in the house drops dead of plague and everybody is quarantined on the island.  The Watchdog runs a very tight ship.  He begins to believe in the Vorvolaka story as people continue to die.  In the meantime, we find out that the Consul’s wife is subject to cataleptic fits and is terrified of being buried alive.

This is a bit too all over the place to be really good.  I never was quite sure what exactly was meant to be happening.  I might need to listen to the commentary to find out.  The ending is also anti-climatic.  I can imagine this being made as an anti-McArthy allegory to great effect.  Karloff is great as always in a rare role where he gets to play a real human who has his faults but is not really such a bad guy.

Trailer