<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThis is a real class act. An MGM movie, produced by Joseph Manciewicz (All About Eve, The Philadelphia Story), directed by Jules Dassin (Brute Force, Never on a Sunday) and starring Joan Crawford (lots and lots of other films). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throw in music by Franz Waxman and gowns by Irene and you can see JW is really starting to play in the big league now, even if he\u2019s still only on loan-out from Republic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The thing is, you can\u2019t really categorise Reunion in France as a full-blown John Wayne movie, with or without him as the star, as he doesn\u2019t wander onto the screen until 40 minutes in, and when he does I only counted about 6 scenes in which he actually featured. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If anything it\u2019s Crawford\u2019s love interest, Philip Dorn, who should have received second billing, with Duke maybe tagged on the end of the cast as a guest star. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if Richard Boone had more screen time in The Alamo than Duke gets here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All that aside though, this is quite a good typical Hollywood French war movie, with someone singing Frere Jacque in the background just in case we\u2019re not sure where the film is set, and the French newspapers sporting English headlines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without Wayne this would be an old-fashioned studio vehicle for Joan Crawford to play yet another of her staunch female characters sporting large shoulder pads, a haughty look and a cigarette and glass of champagne always within easy reach. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She\u2019s a rather superior upper class dame forced onto her uppers once the Nazis occupy France and compulsorily moved out of her palatial dwelling into the flat of her former concierge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A couple of nice touches along the way – the dining tables with candles set up in the shape of a swastika, and nasty Nazi John Carradine bemoaning the fact that once they invade England he\u2019ll soon be enduring a foggy winter in London. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throw in a bit part from Ava Gardner as an uncredited sales girl and those gowns (with not one wire coat hanger in sight) and it gives the similarly themed Casablanca, which was released the month before this, a good run for its money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Duke finally turns up he\u2019s playing a hungry and tired (and a bit frisky too \u2013 talk about overpaid, oversexed and over here) bomber pilot on the run from the Gestapo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It turns out he\u2019s a member of the RAF Eagle squadron which was populated during WWII by American volunteer fliers looking for action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wow, Duke Wayne flew in the RAF. Who knew? What with him and Ben Affleck fighting on our side (check out the first 20 minutes or so of Michael Bay\u2019s Pearl Harbor \u2013 on second thoughts maybe not) it\u2019s no wonder Great Britain won the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Too much Crawford \u2013 not enough Wayne.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Pittsburgh (1942)<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nNot the best of the Dietrich \/ Wayne trilogy of films \u2013 that honour belongs to The Spoilers \u2013 it\u2019s also not that engaging either. Even Randolph Scott in the cast doesn\u2019t help lift this one above mere curiosity value. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a strange concoction of WWII propaganda film joined up with a coal mining story that tells in flashback the story of two successful industrialists \u2013 Scott and Wayne \u2013 who start out as lowly paid miners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a bit of a heavy handed saga as the fortunes of JW, as Pittsburgh Markham, waxes and Waynes \u2013 sorry about that. It\u2019s also unintentionally hilarious, especially the early sequence in which Dietrich, dressed to the nines as usual, helps to lift a huge wooden beam in a mine cave-in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It turns out she\u2019s from a coal mining community as well, which is even more risible in a way. The script\u2019s not that hot either. Sample line from Wayne to Dietrich: \u201cI\u2019m your kinda guy, see, and you\u2019re my kinda gal. We were cut from the same chunk.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m assuming by chunk he means chunk of coal but it could just as equally be an example of 1940s script hep talk that I have yet to become acquainted with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And another thing. Should Randolph Scott really be smoking a cigarette in the middle of a laboratory surrounded by God knows how many combustible solutions? Didn\u2019t they have health and safety back then, or was that invented just to get up everybody\u2019s nose in today’s world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also detect a slight whiff of socialism in the script, what with Wayne\u2019s character arguing that if Scott sets up business with him they\u2019ll be able to pay workers a living wage and provide medical care. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wayne\u2019s back to heel country again, as in The Spoilers, this time using everyone around him, including Scott and Dietrich, to further his own ambitions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wayne and Scott, as his ex-business partner, inevitably square up to each other in a fistfight, Scott this time taking the honours. It\u2019s nowhere near as good as their encounter in The Spoilers, and the whole exercise comes across as something the studio hurriedly threw together in order to cash in as soon as possible on America entering WWII.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The overt message that everyone needs to forget their personal issues and pull together in time of war is however a laudable one. The propaganda element also gives credence to the suggestion that Wayne was more useful making these kind of Hollywood films rather than actually going off to fight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem is that this overwhelms the obligation to also entertain the audience and provide a storyline that should occasionally veer towards realism, something Pittsburgh fails to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mildly entertaining at best, although watching these JW vehicles chronologically gives one the opportunity to see him grow and stretch himself as an actor, so it\u2019s not all bad. Just a bit \u2018so-what?\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One for only the most ardent JW fan if I\u2019m honest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nI have to admit this isn\u2019t a JW film that\u2019s ever touched upon my consciousness at all. In other word\u2019s I\u2019d never heard of it until recently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can tell just by the opening music and the declaration of \u2018Once upon a time\u2019 on a title card that we\u2019re going to the land of romantic comedy with this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be more specific we\u2019re in Cowboy and the Lady territory, only instead of Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon we get JW and Jean Arthur. JOhn Wayne plays a rodeo rider called \u2013 who else? \u2013 Duke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jean Arthur as Mollie decides to take a bus trip out West to get a flavour of the place, as young women back in the 1940s were wont to do, and immediately falls for the first cowboy to be thrown from a horse and land in her lap. Guess who that cowboy is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film gets off to a lively start with Phil Silvers in early Bilko mode as a bus driver but it\u2019s no more than a cameo, which is a shame. A bit more Silvers and this film could have been genuinely funny. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although I have to admit the sight of Wayne wearing a kitchen apron is slightly amusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Duke\u2019s a bit of a lady\u2019s man and marriageaphobic to boot, whilst Mollie is a one-man at a time woman so they don\u2019t exactly hit it off straightaway until she brings Duke some luck at the gambling table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Along the way we\u2019re treated to a meticulously choreographed comedy bar room brawl and plenty of stock film footage of real rodeo riders in action. Not too sure how JW was helping out the war effort with this concoction but maybe he churned out one for himself every now and then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The character of Mollie comes across as a bit of an air head if truth be told, what with having an imaginary horse called Gwendoline with \u2018eyes as big as hamburgers\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m guessing that what with a lot of scriptwriters unavailable due to the inconvenience of Word War II the studios resorted to employing drug addicts in their stead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jean Arthur gives it a touch of the Frank Capra\u2019s – highly appropriate seeing as she made three films with Capra back in the 1930s – with a blatant steal from It Happened One Night, revealing her legs in true Claudia Colbert fashion to hitch a ride. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole \u2018will they won\u2019t they?\u2019 rom-com thing includes Molly taking the blanket from Duke\u2019s horse and the horse ending up with pneumonia so it\u2019s a bit of a lightweight affair with hardly any cowboy action to speak of, but that\u2019s cowboy fish-out-of-water romantic comedies for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the whole it\u2019s a fairly likeable JW vehicle and Jean Arthur more than holds her own with her onscreen partner, but it\u2019s no Hollywood classic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is part 3 in what is becoming a bit of a mini series of John Wayne movies that I missed when they were originally released largely as I wasn’t a JW fan until I was born. So it was only … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,21],"tags":[57,102],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3034"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5345,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions\/5345"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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