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War is where one loses sight of things, regaining faculties is a painful homecoming. The Philadelphia bachelor (John Garfield) meets his future bride (Eleanor Parker) with candle in hand during a blackout, it's a blind date, "a dreary evening with an awful drip" at the bowling alley blooms into a romance. Fateful news heard on a dismantled radio before dinner, nobody quite knows where Pearl Harbor is. The fellow eagerly exchanges a Canadian hunt for enlistment, "I bet it would be more fun shootin' Japs than bears." "You don't figure they could shoot you?" "Me? Well, what have they got against me?" The shift from chummy to harrowing is absolute, Delmer Daves splendidly stages the skirmish in a Guadalcanal swamp as a hellish vortex where the enemy is a taunting voice inching closer and closer until it's a grenade blast to the face. "Brother, we're hangin' on the ropes and the referee's up to eight." A black screen states the veteran's condition, blindness is but one of afflictions in the Red Cross ward, Garfield with eyes hooded by shadows evinces an arresting stillness to contrast with his earlier boisterousness. (Negative film stock deforms the dream reunion, Parker recoils from spirals reflected on her beau's tinted specs.) Ahead of The Best Years of Our Lives, the bitter return into civilian order. "I'm making progress, sir. I'm trading a couple of eyes in for a ribbon on my chest." The disabled hero sits uneasily by the Christmas tree, his glimmer of hope is a blurry cab, the question of whether he'd do it again goes unanswered. "Well, everybody leans a little on somebody. Nobody stands alone." Renoir is nearby with his own formulation of war and vision (The Woman on the Beach). With Dane Clark, John Ridgely, Rosemary DeCamp, Ann Doran, Ann E. Todd, Warren Douglas, Don McGuire, Anthony Caruso, and Moroni Olsen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |