Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1943

The Contenders:

Air Force
In Which We Serve
The North Star
Princess O’Rourke (winner)
So Proudly We Hail!

Bataan Love March

Film: So Proudly We Hail!
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Sometimes I don’t pay attention to my NetFlix queue, and what shows up is something I don’t expect. Thus it is that So Proudly We Hail! arrived the day after Christmas. Well, these movies don’t watch themselves, and I was going to watch it eventually anyway, right? I can’t say I was particularly in the mood for a medical drama, a war film, or a military romance. I also wasn’t really in the mood for a romantic film with Claudette Colbert at this point in her career. The elfin cuteness that defined Colbert in films like It Happened One Night had worn off at this point in her career. One of the main objections I had to The Palm Beach Story from the year previous to this release was the Colbert couldn’t pull off being the epitome of desirable womanhood. Still, I was interested to see Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake in their prime.

Now, if I’m completely honest (and I always try to be), I went into this completely cold. I expect this to be a straight happy propaganda film. I half expected it to be a musical. It’s not. It’s really, really not. This may be told from the perspective of nurses, but these are nurses who are on the front lines in the Philippines. There are battle sequences here that are as close as you’re going to find to the real thing for 1943. It’s pretty impressive, even if to modern eyes it’s easy to tell when we’re on a sound stage.