Three Came Home - 1950

Three Came Home (1950) is notable for its presentation of courageous women struggling to survive in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, and for its presentation of their captors in a way that is not a racist caricature.  Both are a big accomplishment for Hollywood at the time.

Claudette Colbert stars as Agnes Newton Keith, on whose memoir, Three Came Home, the movie is based. Miss Colbert had long since been a giant in Hollywood, whose ability to play drama or comedy was equal and impeccable. This movie benefitted especially from another quality she displayed which was more subtle: a kind of impression of being unassuming. Another actress might have played this role chewing the palm tree and barbed wire scenery, but Colbert moves from one incredible situation to the next like a person who at once has no idea how she got here, but is intellectually open to every experience. As such, she is our stand-in.

Today we celebrate TCM’s star of the day, Claudette Colbert, in the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon hosted by Kristen Lopez over at Journeys in Classic Film.

Agnes Newton Keith, an American, is the wife of a British official, the Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture, in Borneo. Agnes herself is a writer, having authored a book on her experiences as a Yank in Borneo. She is the only American among a colony of Dutch and English government workers and their families.  It is a world of wearing tropical whites and delegating labor to native servants. War breaks out, and the Japanese Army reaches them far sooner than they’d imagined.

Patric Knowles plays Colbert’s husband, and little Mark Keuning plays their son. He was about six when he did this role, and played in only one other movie, in the same year.  When it appears the Japanese are on their way, Mr. Knowles encourages his wife to take their son and leave for her home country, the U.S., but she wants to stay.  We listen to the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio, and a month later, everyone in their small community is taken prisoner.

Sessue Hayakawa, whose film career dates back to the ‘teens when he was a matinee idol in silent movies, appears as Colonel Suga, who will figure prominently as Colbert’s counterpart in the story. Hayakawa has read her book on Borneo, and he is very impressed with her, “You were very sympathetic with Orientals,” he remarks, “It’s not usual, you know.”  We have the suggestion that racism is a subplot to the story.

Mr. Hayakawa’s character studied in the United States as a young man, and he and Colbert reminisce about their college years.  It is one of those moments where Colbert’s quality of being unassuming makes the scene almost otherworldly for her being able to take in his surprising words and gentlemanly behavior (he lights her cigarette) while being scared to death at the soldiers with their bayonets about to herd them into a concentration camp.

The Japanese soldiers are present everywhere, some are stony-faced and stoic, some are cruel, some are bumbling, but all are human. That is one of the achievements of this movie, made only five years after the war ended.  Agnes Keith in her book was clear that she felt barbarism was to be found not in people, but in war, and the movie seems to have followed the spirit of her book.

The other aspect of Keith’s book well replicated in the film, as Colbert remarks, “Life was reduced to one simple, stubborn purpose – to keep alive.” 

They are brought on trucks down the jungle island to a camp where they spend nine months, the women and children separated from the men.  The men’s camp is nearby and they sometimes catch glimpses of them out in forced labor parties or are left notes.  There is a harrowing scene where Colbert sneaks out at night to meet her husband in the bush, while she is weak with fever, having not seen him for five months.

There are scant rations, working in rice paddies, beatings.  Colbert clings to her son and cuddles him.  Her friend Betty, played by Florence Desmond, sneaks her food from the garbage.  There is more in the book about the Dutch and English communities and the sometimes rancor between them, but the movie flows along quickly and with dramatic visuals of the muddy camps in the rain, of a group of British women singing “God Save the King” in their bunks at night while Colbert and her son, giggling, substitute the words for “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” of the threat of death always present.

They are moved to a new camp where they will spend the rest of the war, and will not be near the men anymore. They are allowed a distant goodbye with a ditch between them, barely allowed to touch their fingers if they can reach far enough.

The commander at the new camp, Lt. Nekata, is played by Howard Chuman. He is sadistic.  One night, Claudette Colbert is outside the hut retrieving laundry when a guard tries to rape her.  She reports the incident to Mr. Chuman, who wants her to sign a confession that nothing happened and that she lied.  She refuses, and Chuman has one of his men beat her.  The scene is about to be repeated the next day, when Sessue Hayakawa shows up unexpectedly, is delighted to see her, and he seems like a hero because we know she will be safe if he is near.

Though he is obviously strict and authoritarian, he behaves kindly to the children in the camp, and insists Colbert sign a copy of her book to him.  Toward the end of the war, in August 1945, they know that Allies will eventually arrive.  Hayakawa is stunned, almost somnambulant, but not because the Japanese have lost the war and he will likely face retribution; it is because, as he confesses to her, his family have all died at Hiroshima.  He says of his three kids, “Three of the dearest children you ever saw.”  Later, while watching Colbert’s son and some other kids playing in his garden and eating fruit he gives them, he will break down and sob.

A month later, in September, 1945, they are liberated, with a long scene of reuniting with the men prisoners that is more suspenseful than jubilant as we discover some of the women will not see their husbands again. Colbert at last spots her husband, stumbling down the dirt road on crutches.

The film was directed by Jean Negulesco with a smooth, rather quick pace and many dramatic visuals, but one aspect to the book was left out of the movie.  It is not dramatic, but it is important to the character Colbert plays.  Agnes Keith made secret notes and left them on bits of paper stuffed into cans, buried in the camp, sewed into her son’s teddy bear, hidden all over, and when she was liberated, she made stubbornly certain that she was not going to leave this part of her behind.  She was a writer.  She scrounged up all her notes and took them with her, and they eventually became her book.

The story of women in a Japanese concentration camp is reminiscent of our look here at A Town Like Alice (1956), which took place on the Malay peninsula.  Nevil Shute’s novel was based on stories of women’s real-life experiences as prisoners of war, but because he was a novelist, that story made more of a full arc in the telling.  Agnes Keith’s memoir was nonfiction, so it was detailed and precise, and less concerned with dramatic arcs, more concerned with chronicling a record. Nunnally Johnson’s script is necessarily episodic.  The movie does not tell us, as the book does, that Colonel Suga committed suicide in his Allied cell by cutting his throat on the day Agnes Keith, her husband, and son, left for the United States.

Claudette Colbert, despite her reputation for crisp, aristocratic elegance, had an everywoman quality that lent itself to her achieving a full spectrum of strong women’s roles during World War II: A nurse on Bataan here in So Proudly We Hail! (1943), a wife and mother keeping the homes fires burning—and eventually going to work as a Rosie the Riveter here in Since You Went Away (1944), and in this film, certainly an impressive trilogy. 

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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.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim - 1947

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (1947) is an affectionate spoof of a suffragette (or suffragist, as they actually called themselves) and her mission to become independent and self-supporting as a first step to gaining the right to vote, which, as we know, was a long way off.  We celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment this week, which gave women the right to vote in all federal and state elections.  It was not “universal.”  The poll tax and civil rights abuses kept women (and men) of color, and Native Americans, from voting in certain parts of the country until the late 1950s and finally, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination in registering to vote and being able to vote.

The real story of the fight for women to achieve full voting rights in this country, which took several generations, is a frustrating and often harrowing, even horrific, series of events. Recently, PBS tackled the subject in an excellent two-part documentary, “The Vote,” as part of its American Experience series.  Have a look at the clips on the website, and don’t miss the chance of watching it the next time you see it scheduled on your local PBS station. It is a well-told examination of the truly dramatic and inspirational fight that women endured to gain this most basic right of citizenship.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, obviously, does not tell the story of women’s suffrage in all its fullness, or grim realities.  To give it its due, it does show strong, intelligent women bucking the powers that be to gain respect (which, without civil rights, no respect would be required), and it shows the men to be grudging, but ultimately won over by the ladies’ perseverance.  And charm. That, it seems, would always be a necessary element. Hollywood was certainly frank about that.

Classic films were not dismissive of the 19^th Amendment, but on the few occasions Hollywood tackled the subject, it was always in this quaint, stereopticon view of The Good Old Days and my, wasn’t Grandma spunky?  We covered The Strawberry Blonde (1941) here, which showed Olivia de Havilland’s suffragette as a foil and a mere subplot to James Cagney’s aspiring dentist dealing with legal issues who didn’t get the girl of his dreams. Again, the story is quaint and affectionate, down to the singalong ending.  The suffragette theme is mere window dressing.

When it comes to this cozy view of the fight to gain suffrage, I think my favorite example is from Mary Poppins (1964), where Glynis Johns sings with ladylike gusto, “Well done, Sister Suffragettes!”  My favorite line, delivered with gentle sincerity: “Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group – they’re rather stooopid.”

Her jubilant, sunny, marching rant in the foyer of her home is turned into a party when the servants, Reta Shaw and Hermione Baddeley join in, dragging into the chorus the reluctant Elsa Lanchester (the children’s nanny who is about to quit, thereby creating a job opening for the new nanny, Mary Poppins). 

The background to Glynis Johns’ suffragette activities is sketched out for us by her husband, played by David Tomlinson, who sings with self-satisfaction, “King Edward’s on the throne; it’s the age of men!”  He is lordly, and therefore is somewhat clownish, but his wife is equally clownish, hiding her activities from him, stuffing her sash in a closet before he comes home. “You know how the cause infuriates Mr. Banks.”  At the end of the movie, she will give up her sash to make a tail for her son’s kite.

Interestingly, the magical, yet no-nonsense Mary Poppins is the ultimate feminist in the movie – independent, self-assured, not taking orders.  But she is humanized for us by being vain in a typically feminine manner.

It is 1910 in Mary Poppins, but The Shocking Miss Pilgrim takes us back to 1874.  Female independence from men is tied to, for me, a beloved object—the typewriter.  Betty Grable stars as Miss Cynthia Pilgrim, a new graduate of a business school in New York which has admitted women for the first time.  She and the other female students are admonished at the beginning of their course of study: “Until now, the business world has been a man’s world. If you fail, it will remain so!”

That’s quite a burden on their shoulders, but they are courageous pioneers, and Betty becomes the class champion at typing.  The students are referred to prospective employers (in an immediate job placement program that might be enviable for any college student today) and Betty draws a shipping company in Boston run by Dick Haymes.

Mr. Haymes runs his family firm, which is actually owned by his suffragette aunt, played by Anne Revere.  Haymes, however, thinks that women do not belong in the workplace and is surprised when Miss Grable shows up for work, as he thought he would be sent a male typewriter (or typist, when the person doing the work was finally viewed as separate from the machine).

Another person in the all-male office who disdains women in the workplace is Gene Lockhart, who plays the office manager.  The guys at first mock her, but her moxie, and her good-natured ability to take kidding endears her to them.  They put on their suit coats in a gentlemanly effort to not show her disrespect by working in the same room with her in their shirtsleeves.  Ah, me, but such niceties are lost to us today.

All are fascinated by her clatter on the typewriter, which was introduced in this same year of 1874 to commercial offices, though it would be a long time before they became common in workplaces or even had a standard keyboard.  Though Betty was the class champ in typing, we can see she does not know how to touch-type.  She does the old hunt-and-peck with two fingers. Actually, the touch-typing system was not invented until 1888, so this is not an error.

You will notice also that her typewriter appears to be operated with a foot treadle; this is because the first typewriters put out this year of 1874 were mounted on sewing machine stands and the foot treadle operated the carriage return.  They typed only in capital letters. So all your business correspondence would be screaming.

Betty takes a room at one of the few lodging houses in Boston that accepts women office workers, who are shunned as undesirables, women of probably questionable virtue.  Like actresses.

Elizabeth Patterson is her kindly landlady who takes her in and who belligerently accepts all outcasts from Boston society, including artists and writers.  Gad!  Arthur Shields and Allyn Joslyn are two of her vagabond lodgers, and together they make up a happy family.

Anne Revere recruits Betty into the local suffrage movement and Betty makes a hit making speeches. She drags the reluctant Dick Haymes along, and we have our obligatory, if clunky, romance budding between them. Dick introduces Betty to his mother, a high society lady played by Elisabeth Risdon, who is also a closet suffragette and who will, at the end of the film, buy her own typewriter.  I love the line when Betty, who is surprised to discover the great lady is a kindred spirit, is answered by Miss Risdon, “You expected to find a witch burner.”  This, of course, a nod to a period in Massachusetts history when intolerance, as it will, brought ghastly tragedy.  (It’s a common euphemism, of course.  Nobody was burned in Salem for witchcraft; nineteen were hung, one was pressed to death, and others died in jail.  Burning at the stake in Europe, of course, was another matter.)

As long as we’re being sticklers on accuracy on my home state, I’d like to congratulate those responsible for this film for the correct pronunciation of “Peabody.”  Hereabouts, it is not pea-body.  It’s PEAbudee. One of the men in the office, Mr. Peabody, who presents her flowers, corrects Betty on her pronunciation. 

Like Glynis Johns, Betty Grable dons her “Votes for Women” sash and heads out for another rally.  True love does not run smooth, especially when the ardent young man thinks suffragettes are frustrated old maids. But Betty is sensible, not flighty or shrewish.  She thinks women should gain equality by entering many careers, rather than just protesting. When he tries to replace her with male secretaries, he finds them lacking in…uh, charm.  Finally reverting back to female secretaries, he finds them plain, unattractive, and none suit him. He goes to the Boston Academy of Typewriting for a new graduate.  Our old friend Mary Field is the receptionist who refers him to the manager—Betty Grable.  Ah, Dick Haymes sees the light.  It is implied, rather than stated, that he has come around to the idea that women are just as capable in business as are men. Will they marry?  Will she give up her job if she does marry him?

How old will she be when she finally gets to vote in 1920?

Many social issues were covered across a broad spectrum in films from the 1920s through the 1950s, yet women’s suffrage was not really addressed except in parody.

There is a line in the “Sister Suffragette” song from Mary Poppins that Glynis Johns sings: “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us, and they’ll sing in grateful chorus, ‘Well done, sister suffragette!’”

Hollywood has never really said, “Well done,” or given them their due, and perhaps even today, neither have we.  Watch the PBS documentary.  Then go vote, each and every election you can. It took a lot of sacrifice and fighting to get that right.  If circumstances arising from the pandemic makes it more difficult for you to vote, or the current traitorous administration of criminals tries to stop you, then move heaven and earth to do it.

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.

 

 

 

SALE - Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

 

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star., my book on the career of multitalented actress Ann Blyth is on SALE until Monday, August 17th (in celebration of Ann Blyth's 92nd birthday on August 16th). The eBook is reduced to $4.99 (regularly priced at $9.99), and the print book is reduced to $19.99 (regularly priced at $25.00)

Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's WATCH ON THE RHINE, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in MILDRED PIERCE (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals.

Get your copy of the eBook at Amazon here.

Get your copy of the print book at Amazon here.

I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for reading!

Requiescat in Pace - Olivia de Havilland

The incomparable Olivia de Havilland has exited this world after celebrating her 104th birthday, leaving us breathless, as usual, with the sum total of her talent, her elegance, her grace, and an unusual quality of self-knowing. Among her films we've discussed here are The Heiress (1949), for which she won one of her two Oscars and was made in the period where she did her strongest work; The Strawberry Blonde (1941), one of her last pretty young ingenue roles before her court fight with Warner Bros. resulting in her win and "the de Havilland decision"; and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), a lovely example of her early work, so mature, which brought her to Hollywood as a teenager.

Of all the greats we've lost this year, her career stretches farthest back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Sometimes interviewers ask stars if they watch their old movies, but I wonder if someone like Olivia de Havilland, who had retired happily to France many years ago, only dabbling in TV in the final years of her career, watched any classic films at all -- and especially, did she enjoy recalling former colleagues in the industry.  For someone who has lived more than a century, one outlives almost all relationships.  Someone in the entertainment business has many more people passing through their lives than most of us do in our occupations.  We may number our working acquaintances in the tens; someone like Olivia must have known hundreds.  Did she ever watch a film and smile at being reminded of someone she knew?

For all her class and elegance, I like to think of her humor and this clip from Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) doing a jitterbug parody with Ida Lupino, and George Tobias, who despite being a character player (usually of simpletons), gets the starring role of squiring the two hepcats. 

Bud and Lou on your home projector...

More on Castle Films this week...and an interesting variation.  Midget Car Maniacs (1947), a short subject comedy starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, could be purchased on 16mm or 8mm by Castle Films for your home viewing pleasure on the projector you kept on the shelf in the living room closet.  It was, I believe, pieced together at least in part from discarded sequences from another film or films.  

You'll recognize some old friends in the cast: Nat Pendleton, Don Beddoe, Milburn Stone, and others.

The Castle Films version is silent, shown with titles.  There was also a sound version for the theaters, and eventually, television.  You can see both versions on YouTube.

Castle films at home

As this ad from 1941 reminds us, long before there was the VHS cassette, serious film fans had those 16-mm reels of "6 great cartoons to select from"..."each a great thrill on your own screen!"  

So get out your projector, put up that screen, and make the popcorn.  "Let's movie," as they say on TCM.

Requiescat in pace - Carl Reiner

Carl Reiner will be remembered for his long career and incredible talent, for being a mensch, for being a pioneer of early television.  For just a moment, let's remember a scene from those early years and the man who came into our living rooms as a friend we loved and looked forward to seeing.  Here from the fantastic Your Show of Shows, he provides support to Sid Caesar in one of the funniest sketches ever performed on television.  How fitting that it is also a parody of television. From April 3, 1954...

Requiescat in pace - Vera Lynn

Dame Vera Lynn (2017-2020) has died at 103 years old, but longevity in a challenging world is only one of her accomplishments.  She was still topping the charts in her nineties and past 100 with her exquisite voice.  

Beloved in the United Kingdom for her lovely renditions of "We'll Meet Again," "The White Cliffs of Dover," and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," among others, she performed on radio and for the troops during World War II. Such was her popularity that in 2009 she was named the Briton who best exemplified the twentieth century.  

That's quite a label. The sentiment, the patriotism, the pluck, and heartbreaking sweetness of the songs she sang and her impeccable renditions of them perhaps expressed humanity's indomitability in a dark time.  May her voice and those lovely songs echo in our cultural memory for a long time to come.

Classic movies for comfort...

When I think of movies that are most comforting to me in times of turmoil, I think of World War II-era “home front” films. They are not rollicking comedies or fantasy-inspired musicals that serve to take one’s mind off troubles in a way that completely removes the viewer from the present real-life world; however, to me they are deeply comforting.

This is our entry in the Classic Movie Blog Association blogathon: Classics for Comfort.  For more on the posts of other great movie blogs, have a look here at the roster.  The task is to pick five films to soothe and comfort in these challenging days of the COVID-19 quarantine.

The five films I’ve chosen are:

Meet John Doe (1941)

Mrs. Miniver (1942)

I’ll Be Seeing You (1944)

Since You Went Away (1944)

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

What appeals to me in terms of messages of comfort is that each of these films deals with problems that are realistic, the audiences could identify with the problems even if they did not experience each one, and the solutions to the problems did not require luck or a deus ex machina device. The “happy ending” was one usually not of triumph or gleeful surprise, but of humble hope. The heroes were everyday people who displayed moral courage, were tested, and came through by the strength of their character.

Such attributes, and stories, are needed now.

Every movie needs a villain. In Meet John Doe, which I covered here in this post, the villain was American fascism, in the persona of Edward Arnold, a media mogul who sought political power.

In Mrs. Miniver, covered in this post, the enemy was foreign fascism and the Nazi threat during the Battle of Britain. Keeping Calm and Carrying On was only one aspect of bravery displayed in this movie. There are so many charming touches that are like love letters to the world they were leaving behind but hoped to preserve.

I’ll Be Seeing You covered in two posts here and also here; and Since You Went Away, also covered in two posts here and also here, show the American home front and its deprivations, anxieties, and the willingness it took for a comparatively safer society in wartime to shoulder burdens for the common good.

The Best Years of Our Lives, covered here in this post, shows what happened to the weary conquerors of fascism when they straggled back home to a now unfamiliar homeland and the anxious and equally weary people who were waiting for them.

Though I imagine many film fans prefer those rollicking comedies and fantasy musicals as a way to relieve tension, I find those movies more appealing when I am in a lighter mood to begin with and not thinking of troubles.  It takes a certain toughness for Buster Keaton to avoid those oncoming trains and falling houses, and for Laurel and Hardy to execute even the simplest of tasks.  I need to be in a tough frame of mind just to endure their failures.  It takes a sharp wit to appreciate the mental agility of the screwball comedies with their verbal fireworks: the Marx Brothers, Hildy Johnson, and Carole Lombard and her butler all require one to be on the top of her game to keep up with them.

The musicals are pretty, frothy, and certainly escapist, but when I am pondering the troubles of the world, I find it unsatisfying for the girl to discover the bus boy she loves is really a millionaire.  I enjoy musicals, but more so when my troubles can be solved easily.

It is the home front dramas that appeal for their down-to-earth messages of decency, courage, and hope that bring me through the worst of times.  But for those who crave pure escapism, these films are also, according to today’s gritty standards, escapist.  All of these movies show a society that though is in some respects, fractured, nevertheless the decent people who survive their struggles in the end represent the best of our society as it was.  The bad people were the fascists, the Nazis, and the people who admired them.  The bad people were the hoarders, the selfish, the crass, the foolish, the ones who were willing to sell out American democratic ideals for personal gain. The bad people were depicted as repugnant, and the message of country and fellow citizen over self was accepted by audiences.  Is this not escapist?  Obviously, the times in which we live now in the United States would not have ever been tolerated by the World War II-era audiences.  The times in which we live now, where childish fools refuse to wear a mask to protect others; where childish fascist thugs threaten the public with military assault rifles and parade through someone’s hometown streets, and government buildings, without being arrested; and a fascist in the White House backed by his controlled Senate would have been the greatest fear of The Greatest Generation.

So I watch the home front movies, and I am soothed and comforted in a fantasy world of wholesome, homespun courage and grace, and remember a time when patriotism meant sacrifice – like the sacrifice of medical personnel and essential workers today – and hope for a better day.

Please visit the CMBA “Classics for Comfort” blogathon here.

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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.

From the Mailbag...or email inbox...

Just a few odds and ends today...first, Happy Mother's Day to all moms!

Second, I was recently contacted by actress Beverly Washburn, whom we've mentioned several times over the years on this blog for her wonderful work as a child in several major films and her work on the second Loretta Young television series, but also for her interesting memoir on her acting career Reel Tears, here in this post.  It was very kind of her to reach out, and I enjoyed our email exchanges very much. Her warm and friendly personality is every bit as evident as it is in her book.

Last, I want to share with you a request from a reader who emailed me regarding a very dim memory from childhood he has of a film and asked if I could name what it was.  Unfortunately, I couldn't; so I'm passing it on to you with his permission to see if any of you can name the movie for him.  Here's what he has to say:

I just came upon your blog segment about Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here". (See this post here.)

For years I've been puzzling over a bit of a 'wayback memory, that I'm placing at 1947 +/- . I was born in 1942, and in the memory I'm just a little kid.

My parents had taken me to a movie. It must have been a double feature, but I don't recall what we had gone to see. The film ended, another started and, suddenly, my parents were very hurriedly dragging me out of the auditorium. That dragging is what locked in the memory.

What I'm remembering is two guys have been out in the woods and are finishing up a fishing trip, hiking back out. The come into a small
town, are puzzled that there doesn't seem to be anyone around, notice that there are banners hanging from all the light poles. They hear an amplified voice coming from somewhere, follow the sound, and find an
auditorium with all the townspeople inside being harangued by a speaker, again with the hall festooned with banners. That's all because then the auditorium  doors closed behind us as mom and dad dragged me away. I don't know if those banners bore swastikas or if my mind has painted them in later. Just a bit of the film's overture; very little to paint the real plot. Could it have been "It Can't Happen Here"? But you say no production ever came to fruition. Any ideas?

Please let us know if you remember what movie this is.  Thanks!

Rationing - 1944

Rationing (1944) pokes fun at a wartime home front nuisance while at the same time staunchly upholding support for this act of civilian sacrifice.  It is one example of many from that era where decency was expected, sometimes enforced, and lauded as noble in a way that was genuinely and charmingly American. 

Wallace Beery, whose career was an example of that rare character actor-as-star, runs a general store in a small town. Wartime rationing is his nightmare and having to deal with irate customers is the sacrifice he makes to his country during wartime. 

Marjorie Main, in a role unlike her usual crusty maids and aunties, plays the humorless administrator of the local Office of Price Administration, which regulated the ration system and issued books of ration stamps and tokens. They are adversaries and constantly spar, but there is more to their fractious relationship—they were once headed for the altar, but when her mother did not approve, Wallace married someone in France when he was in the Army in World War I, and she married someone else because he was reported missing.

Beery, who makes deliveries to his customers in his car, drives by road signs that illustrate how pervasive rationing has become to society: mile markers are replaced by signs that tell us how many gallons is it to the next town.  Poor Wallace runs out, and has to push his auto.  

Here are some gasoline ration stamps from that era.  Each state issued its own.  Here we have a set from California, and another from Connecticut. The owner of the vehicle wrote the license plate number on the stamps, and they could not be used by anybody else.  See this previous post on gasoline rationing stickers on cars in the movies.

Back at the store, customers clamor for meat, which, of course, could be purchased only if one had the required number of red meat tokens.  Blue tokens were for milk and cheese.

Marjorie Main’s office is next door at the post office.  Wallace petitions her for more gas coupon books.  She won’t give them to him. She lives behind the post office.  Not her usual frumpy role, Miss Marjorie looks quite stylish in her upsweep hairdo and business suit.

She is a model of efficiency, gives him forms to fill out in triplicate and cautions him that he must not sell any merchandise in his store that require tokens, or “points’ without the customer turning in those points with the payment.  The audience at that time surely could relate and smile.

Marjorie Main, a widow, has a daughter played by Dorothy Morris, who is in love with Wallace Beery’s adopted son, played by Tommy Batten. He is preparing to go into the Army.  They want to marry right away, and though Uncle Wallace doesn’t object, they are all afraid Marjorie Main will not give her consent. Marjorie actually does approve of the marriage, but want to make sure practical matters are addressed: What if Tommy is killed in the war and Dorothy is left with nothing, what if she has a child alone.   He must have savings put by before they can marry. Tommy agrees they should wait; it is Dorothy who wants to marry immediately, and they fight. There is a touching moment when Wallace gives him the medal he won in World War I as a good-luck piece before he goes off to war.

Young Richard Hall plays Teddy, a boy whose mother is away looking for work in a war plant, so Wallace his minding him and entertaining him with the rationing book version of Little Red Riding Hood.   His tangled tale gives us an idea of the complexity of the rationing book system.

The movie has villains far worse than the wolf, two of them.

Donald Meek is the equivalent of a home front villain: he is a hoarder.  Wallace admonishes him, and all the crabby ladies who come in for meat and such that the country must save its resources for the fighting troops.

A subplot involves a lady barber with whom Wallace is comically infatuated.  She’d like to wheedle a rationed rubber girdle from Wallace, who must sneak one under the watchful eye of Marjorie Main (and will later have to sneak it back). Marjorie comes to him for a preparation for a toothache, and he sarcastically teases her.  The two old pros play well off each other.

Fed up with the OPA rules, and Marjorie, Wallace takes a train to Washington, D.C., to visit with his senator, who is also his old Army pal, to loosen up the rationing rules for his store. 

The senator reminds him of the vital patriotic nature of rationing, and appoints Wallace to work alongside Marjorie on his local board.  Now the shoe is on the other foot and his added responsibility turns him from a guy who wants to bend rules to a guy who has to make sure the rules are upheld.

And he runs smack into a black market plot right under his nose.  In an effort to raise money for his son to marry, he sells half interest in his store to Howard Freeman, who as it turns out, runs a local black market ring. He is the second villain. In a two-fisted he-man confrontation at the local ice house, Wallace proves himself to be a hero as he uncovers the black market ring and he pummels Mr. Freeman with blocks of ice.  His ex-partner’s share in the store is now bought by Marjorie Main – Wallace’s once and future partner in life.  To avoid a 72-page form to dissolve the partnership in the store, Wallace takes the lesser of two evils: he signs a marriage license instead.

The movie is a lighthearted look at what was really a pain for Americans on the home front, but in reminding them through films, ads, and cajoling by their favorite stars on radio, the civilian population was also painted as heroic and patriotic for cooperating.  It was an effective program for giving the populace a sense of mission.  This is not to say that there wasn’t plenty of irritation felt by people, or that they had a Pollyanna-ish attitude toward rationing.  

Woody Woodpecker in Ration Bored (1943) is, as usual, unrepentant in his exaggerated antics to get enough gas for his car, and a prolonged fight with a cop in a junkyard after he is caught siphoning gas from the cop car, results in the two of them being blasted to kingdom come. We have to assume moviegoers took the hint even if they cheered for Woody.

Masters of the obvious will refer to this movie as dated.  Indeed, for in today’s world where we will die and kill others by not cooperating with simple social distancing restrictions, we have to marvel at how many people in this country put self over country.  And how the more despicable of them do it waving a Nazi flag.

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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.