Skirts Ahoy - 1952

Skirts Ahoy (1952), just the title tells us we’re in for a bit of frothy fun on the waves.  Or with WAVES, but this musical lightweight still deceptively carries a few undercurrents (pun intended) of serious reflection on its era.

Esther Williams, Joan Evans, and Vivian Blaine play a kind of female version of On the Town, which, though that featured three sailors in a musical, had nothing to do with the Navy.  The girls get a scene of being on the razzle in Chicago looking for dates just as the boys were looking for a good time in New York City.  Though their adventure ends with Esther Williams punching out some WACs for hitting on her guy (off camera of course), it begins, unpromisingly, with a visit to a tearoom.

Such is the difference in exploring women’s experiences in the military as opposed to men.  The barroom brawl (even an off-camera one) was meant to be parody.  The tearoom was meant to show what nice WAVES did on leave.

The ladies begin as civilians, and as was typical of the early 1950s, begin as prospective brides or bride wannabes.  Joan Evans, who had a very brief career, most of it on television, is a bride left at the altar by a runaway groom.  Her funny little brother suggests she join the Foreign Legion to forget.  She settles on the WAVES.

Esther Williams is in the opposite predicament.  She’s the one doing the jilting, escaping from her wedding ceremony in her bridal gown to seek a solution to her restless spirit.  Of the three, she takes to the Navy life with the best attitude.

Vivian Blaine, in between her Broadway smash Guys and Dolls and her film appearance in the same roll in the 1954 film of the same name, continues to play a variation on Miss Adelaide here.  She’s a sweet, dumb blonde with an adenoidal voice, who works in a dress shop, dismayed to find her boyfriend has just joined the Navy.  It does not seem to occur to her that he might want to get away from her. 

In the back room of this dress shop are seamstresses bent over sewing machines.  Pleased to see one of them is Kathleen Freeman, one of my favorite bit actresses, who, dubious about Vivian’s attachment to the guy, delivers the line in Brooklynese, “Please don’t take it personally, but you’re a schmo.” 

Off they all go to the Great Lakes Training Center, where we don’t really see much training.  I like the bugler who wakes them up, in a bathrobe and pin curls with the hoarse caterwauling, “Hit the deck!”

Lovely Margalo Gillmore, more known for her stage work than film career, plays the female officer in charge, more a den mother figure than a boss.  She says things like, “There, there, my dear,” and calls them children.

The five DeMarco Sisters have also joined the WAVES, and they get to exhibit their very close harmony singing on a couple occasions.

The ladies tell us they are tired from marching, though we don’t see much of it.  We do, however, get to watch some of their training in swimming. Being an Esther Williams movie, you know she’s never going to be far from a pool.  We may smile at our first glimpse of her in the water, looking askance at a pair of inflatable water wings — because, in order to stay with her buddies, she has not told her superiors that she’s already swum in several other movies and had been a member of the 1940 U.S. Olympic Swim Team. 

Later on she gets to do her thing without any restraint; first with two small children, Russell and Kathy Tongay, who are clearly Aquaman’s kids.  I confess, though, I am uncomfortable with long scenes shot underwater.  I find myself holding my breath. 

When I regain consciousness, lying on the floor, staring up at the underside of the coffee table, I realize I’ve been watching too many Esther Williams movies.

I think her best swimming partner is the inflatable pool toy.  He’s a charming companion.  She drops her skirt and swims in her skivvies in this scene.  I think her nighttime swim with the pool toy is the most romantic and erotic scene she ever did.  I laugh as I type this.  But it’s true.

Her cutest number is non-swimming, but still all wet.  She sings a camp show number called “What Makes a Wave?”  A whole lotta water, we are told, is what makes a wave, and she and her backup singers get slapped in the face with wet mops, squirted with water pistols, and at one point, Esther gets a bucket of water dumped on her while she’s singing. 

I don’t know how she felt about this scene, but she really looks like she’s having a lot of fun.  I’d like to know how many takes it took to get the final version. We see her great comedic timing in this movie; unlike her swimming films, she is not presented as a kind of mythic goddess.

This film may invariably be called “dated”, and of course, it is.  However, I can’t think why anyone would dismiss this movie (or any for that matter) because it is dated.  Being dated is what tells us more about an era than a movie that is so-called “timeless.”  

We move, startlingly, from prospective brides to shy Joan Evans (who was only about 17 or 18 here) telling off her returning fiancé with a remarkable speech of self-empowerment, “You didn’t make a fool of me when you left me at the altar.  I was a fool for being there in the first place!”

He later joins the Navy to follow her.

Esther “picks up” Barry Sullivan in a bar (whom she does not know is the camp doctor, because he is out of uniform) and we have a cute scene of role reversal where she picks the food, the wine, and defends his honor against a trio of unladylike WACs.  We last saw Barry Sullivan in Tension (1949).  She will spend the rest of the film pursing him, but he rejects her.  He sees from her file that she only wants something if she can’t have it, then changes her mind once she’s got it.  At the end of the movie when he confronts her with this, she acknowledges she is assertive and, instead of bending to his will, admits she will never change.

We leave it to Margalo Gillmore, at the final graduation speech to drag us back into the sexual stereotypes of the 1950s by congratulating the women that they have learned to grow beyond the typical cattiness of their sex, that they have proved that women are not “the natural enemies of each other.”  Real-life women already knew that; it’s the movies that stereotyped them.

Other scenes in this movie only raise tantalizing questions.  For instance, at the USO dance, a platoon of drill team members performs close-order marching in a very jazzy and precise routine.  Drill teams such as this have long been a part of the military, where competitions are held among them.  This unit, however, is made up entirely of African-American women.  One wonders why we are being shown an all-black unit in a military that was desegregated by President Harry Truman’s Executive Order in 1948?  It is true that it took a few years for all units to be desegregated; it didn’t happen all at once.  Were there still all-black units in the WAVES in 1952?

These women, by the way, were not real WAVES, despite their proficiency at close order drill. They were dancers and actresses, and according to IMDb, one of them was Juanita Moore, best known for Imitation of Life (1959), who we last saw here in Witness to Murder (1954); and Arte Young, who had a role in the The Bronze Buckaroo (1939) which we mentioned here in our tribute to Herb Jeffries.

Billy Eckstine’s appearance here as a nightclub singer is likely due more to his great popularity at the time than any erstwhile intention to film this movie with a racially diverse cast.  Musician, bandleader and singer, Mr. Eckstine was the first African-American singer of romantic ballads to find success among the general public.  Nevertheless, I could not help but notice he did not look at any white female patron in the nightclub where he sang.  Usually a singer throws out a line or two to his audience, to involve them in the song.  He looks blankly forward, not interacting with his all-white audience.  Who told him not to, I wonder?

We also have, in this hodgepodge of images, a scene where Keenan Wynn, as an announcer, and Debbie Reynolds and Bobby Van, all portraying themselves, sing and dance at the USO show.

And when Esther goes to the movies, we see on the marquee of the theater The Great Caruso is playing.  A little cross-publicity never hurt any studio. (Update: speaking of cross-publicity - we covered The Great Caruso in this post here.)

WAVES stands for Women’s Auxiliary Volunteer Emergency Service, disbanded when women were integrated into the Navy in the early 1970s.

In all this, we get very little of what it’s like for women in the Navy in 1952.  The Korean War is going full-tilt, but it’s not mentioned.  Women were not allowed in combat areas or aboard combat ships anyway, so it’s not likely their overseas assignments would take them anywhere near danger. 

We are given no messages to convince us that women have a place in the military, such as we saw in Keep Your Powder Dry or Cry Havoc, though Barry Sullivan does admonish Esther Williams about behaving badly in public, “People are still prejudiced about women in the service, as you know…” 

But we have the feeling that who could complain about women in the military when it seems like the girls are having such a good time at this college sorority/summer camp/ debutante cotillion in uniform?

Leaving their half-eaten lollipops around for poor “Pops” the plumber to dislodge from the swimming pool pump.

By the way, we have an Innocent Southern Gal in this one too, but amusingly, she is referred to only and never seen.

Esther, as she relates in her autobiography, did have a lasting impact on the WAVES.  She spurned their ugly and impractical swimwear and demonstrated to the Secretary of the Navy a modern latex version that offered greater comfort and support.  The Navy ordered 50,000 suits.

Come back Thursday for our final look at women in the service with Rosalind Russell’s manic turn as a WAC in Never Wave at a WAC (1953). 

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Cry Havoc - 1943

Cry Havoc (1943) transports us to a strange world.  We cling to what little seems familiar, and are forced to either bravely face the terrifying unknown, or just close our eyes to it, waiting to submit to it when it catches up with us.  A compelling stage play/film, it teeters between the rigid spatial boundaries of theatre, and the anything-is-possible artifice of Hollywood.  Most unusual, we are given a glimpse at world where the courage and fortitude of women are honored, and men are largely absent or helpless victims dependent on the women.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and we continue our four-part look at women in the armed services, begun here Monday with Keep Your Powder Dry (1945).  Where that film shows us the sorority atmosphere of basic training for the new Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in the clean and orderly world of stateside army posts, Cry Havoc drops us in the maelstrom of the Philippines during the Japanese invasion. 

Even the title card means business.  I won’t go play by play, but there’ll be some spoilers.

Only two of the women here are military.  Fay Bainter and Margaret Sullavan play Army nurses.  The rest of the ladies are refugees, most Americans, two British, and one Filipina, from towns farther north who were evacuated to the last American stronghold on Bataan.  They become volunteers at the jungle hospital.

It’s a varied lineup.  Marsha Hunt as the head volunteer with hospital experience to show them the ropes.  Ella Raines is a glamour girl, Ann Sothern is a smart-mouthed dame down on her luck who loves to give the others a hard time.  Joan Blondell is the sassy ex-stripper with the heart of gold.

We have the usual innocent Southern Gal played by Diana Lewis, with the most adorable dimples.  She reminds me of Judy Holliday.  Wife of William Powell, it was her last film before she retired from acting. 

Two sweet, gently bred British sisters played by Heather Angel and Dorothy Morris, both students of art and music seem more suited to a rose garden than this hell on earth. 

Connie Gilchrist is on board as the camp cook, dishing out sympathy and lots of rice.

Young Robert Mitchum has a brief spot as a wounded soldier, but the men are the little seen in this film. 

However, it’s worth noting that among the men they treat in the camp hospital are several Filipino soldiers.  The most intriguing male is one we don’t see, except in a distance shot. He is the lieutenant in charge of the communications shack.  We see his name painted roughly on his crude office door in the hut where the women relay radio messages.  Ann Sothern is interested and visits him in his lair, but learns she has competition for his affections from Margaret Sullavan.

It’s not really Sullavan’s film, despite the top billing and the character of central importance that she plays — the head nurse in charge of the women.  Her screen time is intermittent; we spend a lot of time on the back stories and interactions between the other women.  However, Margaret Sullavan captures our attention, and our understanding, every time she pops her head in the room. 

Miss Sullavan brings her long stage training with her; you can see she does not play to the camera, rather she plays off her other scene partners.  That’s a trait among stage-trained actors.  Also, because she is stage-trained, she uses her whole body to express herself, whereas screen actors of the time with no stage experience tended to emote more with the face, which was sort of a technical requirement, and style then, anyway.

She did not make many films, as she really preferred the theatre, but what a great thing it is watch her move from patient to patient when we first see her.  Slumping, slouching, no rigid graceful posing from her.  Nothing seems choreographed.  Her movement is completely natural and appears unrehearsed.  A quick, impatient glance at a chart, a darting glance around the hospital hut.  When she smiles briefly at a patient or a fellow worker, it is a flash, a sparkling nanosecond of some self-deprecating mirth that tells us there is a great deal of charm and a possibly a goofy sense of fun buried in this overworked, intensely focused woman.

We would never know she is dying of malignant malaria.

As we mentioned in the previous post, “Cry Havoc” has many similarities with So Proudly We Hail, but Sullavan is a far more stressed leader than the always-elegant Claudette Colbert, and her charges are far more ill-equipped to this life of service.

Though we have scenes of soldiers lying in the dirt by the hospital tent awaiting treatment, and huts in the background ablaze from the latest bombing run by the Japanese, most of the movie takes place in the underground bunker that serves as the women’s dorm.  Crude bunk beds around a common table, a few lanterns hanging from the log roof.  We can sense the dankness and chill in this room, even in the heat of the jungle.

The women have their personal struggles to overcome: the need to conquer fear, the need to feel useful, the need to give back, the need to prove themselves.  Ann Sothern comes the farthest in her character development.  She starts out as rather sullen and bitter, ever spoiling for an argument.  A poignant scene where she must collect the personal belongings of deceased patients and catalogue them for shipment back to their families in the States helps to knock the chip off her shoulder a little.  She is not completely converted to a mensch until the very end when she and Sullavan face some hard truths.

The younger British girl gets to give “The Speech” about why we are fighting, in a soft-spoken, cultured voice that is notable for its matter of factness in someone who seems to have had such a sheltered life.  She talks of the survival of the free people of the world, and her words may echo in our heads when she is lost during a bombing raid.  She is found, days later, half crazed in a tangle of dead bodies.

Her anguished older sister can hardly bear the heartache, but amazingly rebounds with a warrior’s enthusiasm when she grabs an anti-aircraft gun from a wounded soldier and shoots down an enemy plane (off camera).  She glows when she describes her deed to the others, like she’s won a carnival prize.  If this were an English foxhunt back home, we might say she had been “blooded.”  No one ceremoniously smears blood on her forehead, but it seems as if someone should.

Just as in Keep Your Powder Dry we have another scene of water nymphs bathing in the river.  No Cokes to drink here; just strafing from the enemy that results in the murder of one the girls.

We get “The Speech” again at the end of the film, this time a hard-as-nails version from Ann Sothern, who uses a map of the Pacific as a visual aid for her show-and-tell.  No dewy words of inspiration this time.  The ladies, by now, understand full well that the only way to win the war is to make the enemy work twice as hard for every inch of ground.  “A delaying action,” Claudette Colbert put it in So Proudly We Hail, but here the reality is put more bluntly.  The Japanese are getting closer and closer to their position, and there is no longer any hope of escape, or of reinforcements to wage battle.  They are starving, the hospital is overrun with wounded and malaria cases, and General MacArthur left for Australia.  The ladies will be killed or taken prisoner in a matter of days.  The most noble sacrifice they can make for the war effort is to just wait for it.

Earlier Miss Sullavan gave them the chance to escape to Corregidor (not much of an escape it would prove to be anyway), but they all refused.  As Joan Blondell replies, “A man died in my arms tonight, and now I wouldn’t leave if I knew it was my last day on earth.”

Sullavan remarks to Fay Bainter, “They’re Americans.  They believe in happy endings.”

Miss Bainter responds quietly, “I’m an American.  I don’t.”  She is the picture of a career nurse, an officer in the Army who has seen too much to believe in miracles, but carries on with thoughtful, gentle stoicism.

The Japanese invasion of their camp is dramatically effective, the more so because we do not see caricatured villains.  We see nothing; we only hear single rifle shots, snipers in camp.  The ladies, gathered in their underground quarters, perk their ears and listen.  They know what it is.  Then a sudden burst or two of machinegun fire, and they know the enemy is “mopping up” outside.  Then a shout, an order for them to identify themselves and come out.

That the movie ends with the slow procession of tired, dirty females, arms raised, quietly submitting to a fate they’ve been imagining for the last hour and a half is a tribute to all the times this actually occurred in war zones all over the world, to women all over the world.  I suppose we can’t blame Hollywood for throwing in a few strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as former enemies and romantic rivals Ann Sothern and Margaret Sullavan walk out together.  Most of the film has been fairly schmaltz-free.

Another scene admirable for its restraint — when the male lieutenant is killed, and we have already been told that he is really Margaret Sullavan’s husband, she quietly enters his crude office and we see his world without him in it.  Maps, documents, radio equipment — and his officer’s cap left on a shelf.  Sullavan, a picture of stunned grief and stillness, regards his cap.  It represents him in this matriarchal jungle world where men are hardly seen.

There could have been a greater dramatic exploitation of the story of these women, and would be if this were filmed today — however, that’s one of the elements of this movie that makes it refreshing.  But it was not the director’s forbearance keeping the movie from showing more fear, more vulnerability, more skin, more torture, more rape.  It was the studio’s delicacy in fearing to offend the public.   

What we do see are a group of women we never really get to know well, but we know enough.  Sullavan is an intriguing mystery.  The others are too weary and too wary of attachment with death hovering in the bush to get to know each other that well.  We settle for a few common gripes, and a few helpless tears.  We never really get to know what happens to them when they leave the bunker at gunpoint.

Maybe it’s better that way.

Though we are presented these women as flawed but ultimately grand girls representing the best of civilized democratic nations — most of them American, we are not given the same idealistic message we see in so many other war films of the period.  Instead, we are haunted by what we see, and if that’s not a reason to buy war bonds, I don’t know what is.

Also refreshingly absent are condescending platitudes about women taking only gender-appropriate roles in the war.  These kids may have arrived in summer frocks with Panama hats or picture hats with floppy brims, but they slip into over-sized coveralls and spend the rest of the film with their hair tied back and a constant grimy film of perspiration on their faces.  No crisp uniforms for them, they look like garage mechanics. 

The well-trained WACs of Keep Your Powder Dry only wore such outfits when they were fixing the general’s car on the post.  Even if they serve overseas, will likely never find themselves close enough to the battle lines to be overrun by the enemy. 

Both films, along with So Proudly We Hail, for any flaws we see at the distance of more than six decades, lend dignity to their varied representations of women in war.  Next week, we’ll take two films made in the early 1950s, Never Wave at WAC (1953) and Skirts Ahoy (1952).  Though the Korean War was going on at the time, these films do not present a serious discussion of women serving their country, but rather take a lighter tone.  The first is a comedy, the second a musical.  We might never know we were at war.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Keep Your Powder Dry - 1945

“Keep Your Powder Dry” (1945) shows a sorority-like atmosphere in the Women’s Army Corps of World War II, but poignantly tells a back story greater than the lightweight scenario on the surface.  This movie, like the WAC when it began, walks a tightrope between what the public would accept, and what enlightened possibilities could be explored for women.  The Army brass was more supportive of the program than the doubtful congressmen who argued the legislation to permit it, and more than the flippant journalists who treated it as a carnival act, and more than the ladies’ fellow male GIs, who were suspicious of the virtue, and femininity, of WACs. 

The Army brass, such as Generals Eisenhower and Marshall, knew how desperately they were needed in a two-front war.

This week and next we’ll be discussing women in the armed services through a range of drama, comedy, and musical.  Today it’s “Keep Your Powder Dry”, which hovers between comedy and drama, and “Cry Havoc” (1943), a drama in the manner of “So Proudly We Hail” (1943), which we covered in this previous post.

Next week, it’s a lighter tone in the post-World War II world of “Never Wave at a WAC” (1953) with Rosalind Russell, and “Skirts Ahoy” (1952) with Esther Williams.

“Keep Your Powder Dry” stars Lana Turner, Laraine Day, and Susan Peters as three WAC recruits.  We start the show with an operetta lyric over the opening credits that reminds us, “…for the WAC is a soldier, too.” 

It sounds like a college cheer and we might meet Andy Hardy somewhere.  The title card looks like a Nancy Drew book.

How desperately needed more “manpower” was in the service is illustrated in a strikingly more matter-of-fact manner by Bing Crosby on his Kraft Music Hall radio program on October  7, 1943 when he made this pitch:

“If you’re a woman between 20 and 50, if you’re not now in a war job, if you have no children under 14 and if you’ve had two years of high or business school the Army’s got work for you, work that’s vital for victory…that means more soldiers for combat while members of the WAC take over technical jobs in communications, transport and air force, and x-ray photography, and medical and dental labs, in 155 different branches of Army service that the WAC is trained to handle.  The Women’s Army Corps trains you, the career is yours forever.  The pay is that of a soldier of equal rank.  It’s a really important job waiting in the WAC for every gal who is anxious to serve her country at home or overseas.  The WAC has a recruiting office not far from you.  So do your part in hastening the ultimate victory of our forces.  So, speed them back, join the WAC.”

The movie is less direct.

Lana Turner is a spoiled rich girl who parties and wakes up with hangovers (we get an intro shot of the teasing trail of her clothes on the floor) while her best friend, the parasitic Natalie Schafer (yes, yes, I know, Mrs. Thurston Howell III), wakes her up and begs her once again to get her lawyer to release the REST of her inheritance so they can party even more.

Miss Turner’s lawyer reminds her that the trustees of her inheritance will not release her money until she proves to be more responsible.  So, she joins the WAC, thinking it’ll look good and she can always duck out later.

 Susan Peters is a young wife who, in an unusual goodbye scene, helps her husband pack for Army duty while he tenderly wishes her luck on her upcoming basic training.  She, too, it appears is bound for the WAC, as something productive to do while her husband is away.  She believes she will help the war effort and bring him home sooner.  This was a common reason for lots of WAC enlistees to join.

The third member of the trio is Laraine Day, who is an Army brat, chomping at the bit to join the WAC and be a soldier like her officer papa.  He is pleased, and not a bit worried about her virtue or femininity.

A reassurance to a skittish American public, perhaps, who truly wondered if they were tearing the fabric of American womanhood apart by allowing this audacious thing of women into the Army, even in gender-segregated units.

I don’t suppose this film was shown overseas to the boys on the battlefields, but it might have done them good to see an earnest film about earnest young women in uniform not unlike the girls they left behind. 

Certainly no threats to their manhood here, though I smile at the scene late in the movie where Miss Turner looks like one of the GIs with her shirt open and her tie draped loosely around her neck as if she were about to open a deck of cards for poker. 

It’s easy to dismiss much of the film as schmaltz unless you get that society at the time was uneasy about a woman wearing pants, let alone learning mechanical and technical skills.

We see the women briefly wrestling in hand-to-hand combat training (in work dresses), but most of their time is spent marching and…archery?  The marching cadence in soprano voices.

The initiation into the WAC world of military discipline, and helpfulness in the war effort, is filtered through a fine sieve as most of the movie centers on the personality conflicts of the girls and how they overcome challenges.  Lana Turner, who tops her class in identifying aircraft not because she studied the material but because she dated so many pilots, has discovered a new sense of purpose in the Army.  Never taken seriously before, she rises to the occasion and becomes a good soldier, with only two problems: her old martini-soaked friends won’t leave her alone, and Laraine Day is a thorn in her side.

Laraine Day, in her capacity as having grown up on Army posts, becomes the camp know-it-all on how to do things.  She might get as irritating to the audience as she is to Miss Turner, except that Miss Day is so very good in her role.  She’s almost pathologically bossy and interfering, and we see — and by the end of the movie she will confess — that she feels threatened by the glamour girl Turner.  Her authoritarian attitude over the other girls is due to her insecurity at being bested by outsiders who know nothing of her cherished world of Army life.  Her self-revelation at the end where, crestfallen, she faces the truth about her overbearing behavior is a strong, heart-tugging scene as we watch her crumble inside.

Both Miss Day and Miss Turner would have killed each other long before the movie ended were it not for their mutual love of Susan Peters, the peacemaker of the trio.  Susan Peters displays here again that quiet sensitivity and luminous screen presence that was launching her into a promising film career.  Unfortunately, it is difficult to recall Peters without also recalling her tragic end, which began shortly after this film was completed and a few months before it was released.

As many film buffs are aware, Susan Peters was accidently shot during a hunting trip with her husband, Richard Quine, and some friends.  She was permanently paralyzed from the waist down, and though attempted with astounding courage to make an acting comeback in a wheelchair, died in 1952 from a combination of ailments and crushing depression that completely destroyed her will to live.  She was only 31.

Miss Peters’ character is the least confident of the trio, and her lesson by the end of the film is to achieve through hard work and diligence, and find self-confidence at last.  All of these women go through a pre-feminist era experience of empowerment (catch the scene where the girls fix the general’s broken down car for him), and Hollywood does not begrudge them or belittle them. Not this time.  Not when the country was looking for women recruits.  What a safe incubator Hollywood could be from the real world.

Except, of course, for the burning question of the day as to what a WAC’s panties look like.  We are told they are olive drab, but we do not get a long look at the unmentionables.  If we think this scene is frivolous to the point of eye-rolling, then remember that for the smart-ass journalists covering the first WAC recruitment (which started as the WAAC, Women’s Auxiliary Army Corp before they achieved regular Army status), their most common questions were what color was the girls' underwear, and whom could they date?

The dating question is considered in the film, too.

The title of the film comes from the famous quote from the 1834 poem by William Blacker who, writing about Oliver Cromwell “quotes” Cromwell: “Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!”

Of course, in the cheeky manner of studio writers, not unlike smart-ass journalists, the title in this case also refers to a woman’s cosmetics.

Things to note: Agnes Moorehead as company commander is a woman of quiet, ladylike authority.  Her scene where she gives sad news to Susan Peters is both dignified and gently understated.  She is clearly helpless to do anything more than offer kindness from a respectful distance.

I like the camera shot of Peters alone in Moorehead’s office, shot from above.  It’s an instant image of despair and loneliness.

The girls ride off in a truck on which is painted the words “Wolf Trap”.  Apparently the men in the Army Air Corps weren’t the only ones who could paint sexy slogans on their machines.

Many scenes were filmed in Des Moines, Iowa and Camp Oglethorpe, Georgia, which were actual training places for the WAC. 

The girls do a lot of walking and marching in front of rear screen projection of other troops.  This is why the Allies won the war.  We scared the enemy with our rear-screen projection of thousands and thousands of soldiers following right behind us.

Lee Patrick as the ex-vaudevillian who becomes an Army cook.

June Lockhart as the resident Southern Gal.

They drink a lot of Coke.

A scene of swimming at a pond, like water nymphs basking in the sun, drinking their Coke.  Evidently the WAC has time for picnics, too.

For more on the realities of WAC service, their importance to the war effort during World War II (some 150,000 women served) have a look at this article by Judith A. Bellafaire.  It will fill you in on some remarkable circumstances and achievements of the women who served, and will profoundly increase your respect for the ladies who were pioneers among women in the military.  The WAC was discontinued in 1978, and women serving in the Army from that point served along with men.

On Thursday we’ll have a look at “Cry Havoc” which, though much more serious and troubling in nature due to the extreme danger faced by the women on Bataan during World War II, nevertheless caused less public controversy because these women were Army Nurses.  That a female nurse dying in a jungle was more socially acceptable than a female truck mechanic working in the motor pool is just one of those things we need to discover if we are to lump these two disparate films together as equally important artifacts from World War II.  They are, as you’ll see, quite different.

In the meantime, let us not forget that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, while she was still Princess Elizabeth, served in Britain’s counterpart Auxiliary Territorial Service as a truck mechanic and driver.  Have a look at the Pathé newsreel clip below: