Reeling Backward: "Laura" (1944)

"I don't know a lot about anything, but I know a little about practically everything."
                                                            --Shelby Carpenter

I think I should adopt that quote as my new motto. Recently asked to contribute a piece of wisdom I've learned through my career, I offered: "Everyone will disappoint you eventually. So try not to take it personally." Maybe I can meld the two together.

A warm-and-fuzzy guy I am not, and neither is Otto Preminger's 1944 film noir, "Laura." It's a movie with a distinctly pessimistic view of humanity that is photographed with an aching, shadowy beauty. Roger Ebert, in his retrospective column, said the film achieves "a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style."

Joseph LaShelle won the cinematography Oscar that year, beating out "Double Indemnity," "Lifeboat" and "Gaslight," among others. Luckily, unlike some other classic films "Laura" has been wonderfully preserved with a high-quality video transfer.

Some have complained about the impenetrability of the story, but I found it pretty easy to follow. The film also got an Academy Award nomination for adapted screenplay -- along with art direction, supporting actor and director -- based upon the 1943 novel by Vera Caspary. Though, as with a lot of film noir, the convolutions of the plot are less important than the emotions and individual moments.

"Laura" has an audacious premise that's essentially the upside-down version of "Psycho." Instead of the leading lady dying 30 minutes into the movie, here the dead titular woman shows up very much alive around that same time frame. Successful advertising businesswoman Laura Hunt (Gene Tierny) is presumed dead after a woman's body is found in her apartment, wearing her negligee with a face blown apart by two shotgun blasts.

Dana Andrews plays Mark McPherson, the laconic police detective assigned to the case who becomes increasingly obsessed with the victim. "Falling in love with a dead woman," or something like it, is the key line of dialogue mirrored several times in the movie, and on the posters and other promotional materials for the film.

The actual romance between Andrews and Tierny is pretty much kaput from the get-go, with them only exchanging one quick smooch as he's leaving her apartment that feels more Dagwood and Blondie than cascading waves of True Love. But jealousy is more the movie's true subject.

Essentially, "Laura" is a love quadrangle, in which three men vie against each other for her affection. Laura had been engaged to a ne'er-do-well scamp, Shelby Carpenter, a strapping Kentuckian who came from money, lost it all, and now relies on the kindness -- and handouts -- of others.

Hilariously, he is played by Vincent Price, and it is repeatedly commented upon that Shelby is a male bimbo who skates by on his good looks and sex appeal. Price tries on a molasses accent and gives it all a good go, but the notion of his playing a gigolo just doesn't comport with his subsequent screen persona. Plus, he just plain looks weird without his signature pencil mustache.

McPherson takes an instant dislike to Shelby, of course, and places him in the crosshairs as the main suspect.

The fourth leg of the love party is Waldo Lydecker, a pompous and effete newspaper columnist played by Clifton Webb, who scored the film's only acting Oscar nomination. It's a little unclear what his column is about; attacking anyone who pisses him off, as near as I can figure. He's richer than Crassus, spends all his time having lunches and socializing, and also records literary lectures for the radio.

More celebrity than journalist, Waldo first meets Laura when she's a junior adwoman who approaches him at lunch to offer $5,000 to endorse their client's new line of pens. (That's almost 70 grand in today's dollars, folks.) He snootily refuses and goes out of his way to embarrass her in front of high society diners.

"I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!" he sneers. (Sneering is pretty much Waldo's default setting.)

But then Waldo remembers that Laura is a hot young thing, so he seeks her out to apologize, takes the pen deal, introduces her to some important people and launches her career. They're frequent, ostensibly platonic friends, though it seems clear to everyone in the world but Laura that Waldo pines for her.

It goes without saying Waldo absolutely loathes Shelby, and does everything in his power to break up Laura's engagement to him. Later, he turns his ire upon the intrepid lawman when he starts to get moony-eyed staring at the large portrait of Laura that hangs over her mantelpiece. When you're the man who has everything, Waldo finally admits, being denied the one thing you most desire can push you over the edge.

(And if that's not enough of a spoiler on who the murderer is revealed to be, I don't know what could be.)

"Laura" is pretty well bookended by a small sphere of locations and characters. It has the feel of a theatrical adaptation, and indeed Caspary originally drafted it as a play. Other than those characters I've mentioned, there's really only Bessie, the neurotic maid played by Dorothy Adams, and Judith Anderson as Ann Treadwell, Laura's wealthy socialite aunt.

Diane Redfern, the actual dead woman, doesn't even merit a credit in the film (and I haven't been able to find one for the actress who plays her on the usual movie sites). She was a model in Laura's firm who was carrying on an affair with Shelby; he brought her over to his fiancee's apartment while Laura was spending a quiet weekend away.

Ann has been writing checks to Shelby, and hungers to have him for himself. He's a weakling and a coward, she admits, but she wants him for what he is -- whereas her niece sees him as she wishes him to be. A physical affair is strongly implied.

Just so we're clear: that means Shelby has been carrying on with Laura, her aunt and the model. King cad, indeed.

The preproduction/shooting of "Laura" was a complete disaster. Preminger was original slated to just produce because of lingering enmity with a studio honcho. They actually began rolling cameras under another director, who got his wife to produce the famous fireplace painting. Preminger had him sacked and replaced with himself, and even got another painter to as the final insult.

How very Waldo of him!

Other than Webb, the performances don't really stand out from the material. Andrews is pretty flat, and not terribly believable as a streetwise gumshoe. Too handsome, too middle America. (Someone should have seriously considered swapping his role with Vincent Price's.)

Tierny's character is supposed to be very intelligent and personally driven, but we don't get a sense of that from the performance. Despite being a figure well ahead of her time -- a rich and savvy businesswoman who doesn't need a man to complete her -- Laura is rather mousy, reserved and reactive to the men around her.

She's the object, not the subject of the film.

"Laura" is a rather untidy movie, but it makes the most of its strengths and turns some of its weaknesses into assets. It's truly Waldo's story, the tale of a fussy, prissy man who places himself above everyone else, the self-appointed chessmaster who's continually vexed when the pieces won't move around as he directs.

Otto Preminger could probably relate.

Reeling Backward: "Kit Carson" (1940)

It's funny to think about how much liberty Hollywood took with history back in its heyday. Nowadays if they make a movie about something that really happened and change around too many facts, audiences and critics would jump all over it for inaccuracies. But back in the day, they'd unfurl a whole bunch of BS and not blink twice.

Kit Carson, a mountain man, scout and quasi-military man, was already a legend during his lifetime. He helped blaze the trail to California through Oregon, fought in the Mexican-American War and, briefly, the Civil War. Books were written about his adventures as far back as 1849, there were a couple of movies, including 1940's "Kit Carson," plus a 1950s TV show. Most everything about his life, from the books to the shows, was made up out of whole cloth or twisted around to a laughable degree.

Fir instance, Carson actually made several expeditions with U.S. Army Captain (later general) John C. Frémont during the 1840s. Rather than Frémont recruiting Carson as the most renowned scout in the West, the two men bumped into each other on a steamboat cruise and the frontiersman pitched his services to the soldier.

Both men fought in the Mexican-American War, though separately. And both were already married when they met each other -- in Carson's case, several times over to American Indian brides. The certainly never fought gallantly over the hand of a wealthy Californian's daughter, Dolores, played by Lynn Bari.

In one of the more interesting aspects of this movie, each man is actually pushing the woman they love toward the other fellow. Dana Andrews is upstanding and charming as Frémont, while Jon Hall plays the country bumpkin angle to the hilt as Carson. The well-bred Dolores, in typical fashion, finds the lanky scout to be an insufferable savage, until she recognizes his finer qualities.

Frémont offers to marry Dolores, even though he knows she loves Carson, because he's such a selfless guy and all that.

The two men butt heads several times in the early going, but without rancor, as Frémont insists on following his orders to find the most direct route to California to the letter -- even if it means riding right into a trap the Shoshonis have laid out for his troops. Carson, as the hired wagon master for the pioneers trailing in the soldiers' wake, urges caution and forbearance.

"It's better to lose 60 miles than 60 lives," he reckons.

Carson's two gleeful sidekicks are Ward Bond as Ape, a good-natured liar, and Harold Huber as Lopez, their south of the border amigo. They're always ready to ride off with Carson at a moment's notice, quick with a joke and a laugh. Ape gets a love interest of his own, a pinch-faced woman named Genevieve (Renie Riano). But, like Carson, he can't countenance the idea of giving up a life of roaming and beaver pelts for a bed and a home.

The heavy is General Castro, played by C. Henry Gordon. He's secretly supplying rifles to the Indians and goading them into attacking the American wagon trains.

Gordon is as white as me and Huber was a Russian Jew, and don't make for very convincing Mexicans. But that's about par for the course in this movie, in which the several shots of the Shoshonis clearly show most of them to be white guys in war paint and feathers.

"Kit Carson" is amiable, formulaic and dumb as a desert-baked brick.

Reeling Backward: "The Westerner" (1940)

Tonally, "The Westerner" is one of the weirdest films I've ever encountered.

Ostensibly it's about Judge Roy Bean, the famous/infamous Texas Justice of the Peace who essentially operated a combination saloon/courtroom as his own personal fiefdom. He generally dispensed the same punishment to every offender: hanging, and a fine that always equaled whatever currency the man had in his pockets at the time. Bean kept the money for himself as court fees, with enough parceled out to the silent undertaker character who seems to populate every Western.

(I should note the real Bean only ever sentenced two men to hanging, and one of them escaped.)

But Gary Cooper was the star of the movie, so the story was shifted so that Bean was the supporting character and Cooper's character, Cole Harden, became the intrepid cowboy who runs afoul of Bean's frontier justice, but later becomes his friend. Walter Brennan, the great character actor, won his third Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the role, the only person to have done so three times.

As a result, the part that normally would've been the straight-up villain role ends up being a cantankerous, wrong-headed but amiable goof who's more pitiable than hateful. Unlike Brennan's straight-up villain in "My Darling Clementine," there's no suggestion of darkness in his heart -- simply an unbending view that "sodbusters" are the sworn enemy of the cattlemen who settled the town of Vinegaroon.

Bean is a bundle of eccentricities. Other than being a hanging judge, his entire life seems to be wrapped up in the image of English actress Lily Langtry. Her picture is plastered all over the saloon, and when a citified customer discloses that he was once in England but declined to attend one of Langtry's performances, he is summarily thrown out.

Harden is smart enough to leverage the judge's ardor to get him off the hook for alleged horse thieving. He claims to have met Langtry, and even have a lock of her hair back with his things in El Paso. Bean essentially agrees to suspend his sentence if Harden will give over the hair. When the real horse thief turns up, Bean is pleased with how Harden acquits himself, and they form a tenuous friendship based on their mutual ornery-yet-cagey dispositions.

So, even though this is the story of a quasi-jurist who essentially used his authority to murder people who disagreed with him, most of the movie actually has a light, fun-and-games tone to it. The comedic aspect is pumped up by Cooper's performance, which is another iteration of his aw-shucks star persona. His sidewise reactions and double-takes cue us in to how loony Judge Bean is.

The last half-hour or so, though, takes a nose-dive into tragedy. Harden has also befriended some of the homesteaders, including old patriarch Caliphet Matthews (Fred Stone) and his hard-headed daughter, Jane Ellen (Doris Davenport), who is the only one of the farmers brave enough to stand up to Bean.

Harden tries to play the role of the peacemaker, convincing Bean to let the homesteaders farm in peace, while also warning him of a group of farmers who come to town to give Bean a taste of his own medicine and lynch him.

It's not the first time somebody's had that idea -- a running joke is that Bean survived an attempted hanging himself, which left him with a stiff neck that Harden continually has to pop back into place with his hands or, on one occasion, a punch to the face. Almost everything the movie depicts about Bean is Hollywood flimflam, though this bit is actually true.

Anyway, Bean breaks the peace by having his men burn down the Matthews' farm, killing Caliphet in the process. Harden goes to the county sheriff to get a warrant sworn out, and is deputized to bring Bean in. That's impossible while he's surrounded by his henchmen in his own town, which he renames Langtry after finally securing the purported lock of hair (Harden actually snips it from Jane Ellen).

But when Bean hears Lily Langtry is coming to the territory to perform, he has one of his men buy out the entire theater, and burns all of the tickets but one, so he can watch her without distraction. Harden's waiting onstage when the curtain comes up, though.

In a rarity for Westerns of this era, they don't have a quick-draw duel, but simply shoot it out while hiding behind chairs and columns. Fatally wounded, Bean is helped by Harden to Langtry's dressing room to finally meet his idol before falling over dead.

Bean's death doesn't carry any emotional impact, since he's indisputably the heavy of the piece, even if a charismatic one.

According to Cooper biographer Jeffrey Meyers, the screen icon was worried about being upstaged by Brennan, and only made the film  under protest after Samuel Goldwyn enforced his contract. The pairing was so productive, however, that they went on to make four more films together, including "Meet John Doe," "Sergeant York" and "The Pride of the Yankees."

I was struck how physically formidable Brennan appeared next to the 6-foot-3 Cooper. Brennan often played characters much older than himself, and often seemed small and scraggly, and sometimes even wizened. Here he's lean but rangy.

Directed by William Wyler, "The Westerner" has some terrific production values, including the burning of the homesteaders' fields and houses, which even includes the imposition of some special effects flames onto the screen. I also liked that both Cooper and Brennan rode their own horses, including during a galloping chase through the desert.

In addition to Brennan's Academy Award win, the film was also nominated for black-and-white art direction and original story, back when they still had that category. It's odd, since the two credited screenwriters, Jo Swerling and Niven Busch, did not receive Oscar nods but Stuart N. Lake, who came up with the story idea, was.

Judge Roy Bean is an iconic figure made more so by film and television adaptations of his life, including a TV series in the 1950s. There was also a 1972 feature film starring Paul Newman, and this time they cast the movie star in the Bean role, instead of finding some bullpucky cowboy part for  him to play off of.

Reeling Backward: "Battle of the Bulge" (1965)

All movies are on some level flimflam, even the ones that purport to be based on "true events." This is doubly so for war pictures, which must take the chaotic and bloody gruel of combat and some turn it into a digestible cinematic meal. If an obvious narrative doesn't present itself in the historical record, Hollywood will bend over backward to impose one -- never mind how much the made-up characters and plot diverge from reality.

You know you've got a problem with historical accuracy, though, when Dwight D. Eisenhower emerges from his post-presidency blanket of privacy to hold a press conference denouncing your movie. Such was the fate of 1965's "Battle of the Bulge."

This borderline awful war drama is like a Tinseltown Cliff's Notes version of one of World War II's most decisive battles. The real Battle of the Bulge lasted nearly a month, stretched over a huge chunk of Western Europe and involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers and pieces of equipment. The movie version, however, focuses on the plight of a handful of American soldiers at various levels of command, ranging from sergeant up to general.

Not only is the role of the British downplayed in the Hollywood version, I'm not sure if an English soldier even shows up once during the movie's 170 minutes. That's ironic, considering director Ken Annakin is an Englander who directed the British scenes in the far superior "The Longest Day."

Astonishingly, despite being one of the most famous winter military deployments since Valley Forge, there's barely a hint of snow in the film, which looks like it was shot during the full bloom of summer.

My biggest complaint is that all the American soldiers are not individuals but character "types" -- usually ones that synch up nicely with the star persona of the actor playing him. So Henry Fonda is Kiley, a careful and reasonable man whose warnings about a German offensive go unheeded. And Charles Bronson is Wolenski, a tough no-nonsense major who leads a group of hardcase dogfaces.

James MacArthur plays Weaver, an untested young lieutenant who quickly gets wised up by the German Panzer incursion and the tutelage of his wiser sergeant. Robert Ryan is the determined, methodical good general and Telly Savalas is Guffy, a tank sergeant who runs a black market racket on the side and operates as the movie's Bronx-accented comic relief.

None of these actors makes much of an impression, with the exception of Fonda, who could play a telephone switch operator and make it snap.

The real star of the show is Robert Shaw as Hessler, the ambitious, take-no-prisoners German tank commander given a prime spot in the counteroffensive of the Third Reich. Hessler is loosely based on the real-life Panzer commander known for his aggressive tactics that resulted in high casualties among his own forces, while also crushing the enemy.

Outfitted with the platinum blond hairdo he wore in "From Russia with Love" and a few other films, Shaw is the model of the icy Aryan Nazi, who would rather the war go in forever in stalemate than lose his status as a military hero. Hans Christian Blech plays Conrad, his right-hand man and conscious, who whispers in his ear not to be so cruel. In the end, they break ways and Conrad is assigned to tote fuel drums. The final shot of the film is Conrad tossing away his rifle and ammunition belt as the defeated Germans march away home.

Hessler is also implied to order the execution of captured American POWs at Malmedy, an actual war crime that is depicted briefly in the film without a lot of emotional power. Mostly it's used as the turning point of the Weaver character when he stops being callow and learns to accept the consequences of command decisions.

Weaver survives the massacre to, in the movie's depiction, nearly single-handedly stop the German tank advance by rolling some cans of fuel at Hessler's column, blowing them up. Neat trick, that.

Shaw is a real treat as a hiss-able screen villain, but in terms of nuance "Battle of the Bulge" is severely lacking. It's a dumbed-down cut-up of a movie about a great, tragic event. I don't think Ike was the only one who thought it was a serious disservice to the men who fought and died.

Reeling Backward: "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943)

"The law is slow and careless around here sometimes. And we're here to see it speeded up."

Thus speaks the central villain in "The Ox-Bow Incident," a 1943 prairie morality tale that, in truth, contains no real bad guy. That's because virtually everyone in it is morally compromised in some way. The speaker, a vengeful cowpuncher named Farnley (Marc Lawrence), is simply the most overt about it.

This film is from director William A. Wellman; the more I see his movies, the more I become convinced this largely unheralded figure is one of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers. The screenplay is by Lamar Trotti, whose credits include "Young Mr. Lincoln" and "Drums Along the Mohawk," from Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel.

It reminded me very much of "12 Angry Men," also starring Henry Fonda, in that it's about the pitfalls of the group mentality applied to a law-and-justice scenario. A bunch of men who are convinced they are doing right eventually come to see that they've been woefully misguided all along. With "Men" it happens before the verdict is rendered, but in "Ox-Bow" the realization doesn't occur until after three men have been wrongly hanged for crimes they did not commit.

The movie is also notable in that the story unspools in more or less real time -- Wellman includes a single fade-out/fade-in to indicate the passage of time. The film essentially only has three scenes: the first where the townsfolk learn of the murder of a local rancher and form a posse; a brief (and mostly unnecessary) interlude where they erroneously chase down a stagecoach; and the confrontation with the accused trio.

At a spare 75 minutes, "The Ox-Bow Incident" has a stripped-down feel, like the narrative has been boiled down to its barest essence.

Interestingly, Fonda is not the central character, nor is there really any protagonist in the story. Fonda plays Carter, a rather surly and hot-tempered local cowboy who gets caught up in the posse mostly out of fear -- he and his partner Art (Harry Morgan) take part because if they did not, they might be suspected of being involved in the cattle rustling and killing of an upstanding rancher named Kincaid.

Carter acts as sort of the nexus of the plot, whose own story is not central to the narrative but a figure around whom all the other characters travel in close orbit.

Carter and Art ride into town, dusty and thirsty, and find not much going on. They sidle up to the bar for some rotgut whiskey, and Carter learns that Rose has suddenly left town. She was perhaps the only unmarried woman in town under the age of 80, and if she was not exactly Carter's betrothed, then certainly he felt promises had been exchanged between them.

Agitated over stories of cattle rustling, Carter starts a fight with Farnley, getting the best of it but then getting knocked out by a bottle over the head from the bartender. Art revives him with a splash of water, explaining that Carter always feels better after a fight, win or lose. Carter grows ill and stumbles into the street to retch his guts out.

Still bent over, he complains to Art: "Holy cow, now I'm gonna have to start all over again!"

Instead, everyone is riled up by the news of the murder of Kincaid and the theft of his cattle. The sheriff is out of town, but the lackadaisical deputy Mapes (Dick Rich) decides to commission a posse. From the beginning it is clear that they're looking for a purpose, a cure for their idleness, more than justice -- that, and the thrill of seeing somebody swing.

The town drunk (Paul Smith) uses a rope to act out a googly-eyed, tongue-lolling imitation of a man being hanged. It's funny the first time he does it, less so the second, and positively chilling when he does it in front of the accused to taunt them.

Perhaps the film's one major flaw is a chance encounter with a stagecoach along the trail. Stupidly, the posse gives pursuit, instigating the stagecoach hands into shooting Art in the arm. After running them down they learn the coach contains Rose and her new husband, a rich and snooty type from San Francisco. It seems like this sequence is setting up the narrative for more developments, but we never see the newlyweds again.

While the scene has its own momentum, plot-wise it's dead weight.

The most enthralling section is the quick capture and long "trial" of the three men, including Dana Andrews as Martin, the leader, and Anthony Quinn as Juan Martinez. Martin insists they bought the 50 head of cattle from Kincaid wish cash, although they lack a bill of sale. After trying to escape, Juan is also found to be carrying Kincaid's fancy engraved pistol. The third member of the accused is a feeble-minded old man.

The posse includes a large cast of characters. Beyond Farnley, the self-appointed leader is Tetley (Frank Conroy), a former Confederate major who still wears his gray battle uniform 20 years after the end of the war. Tetley is imperious, with a thick veneer of polite gentility masking his harsh, uncompromising ways. He mostly comes along as a way to instill some manhood in his gentle-minded son (William Eythe).

Jane Darwell, forever Mrs. Joad from "The Grapes of Wrath," has a disturbing turn as a hard-bitten woman who's as bloodthirsty as any of the men. She has several scenes where she cackles with glee at the plight of the three accused men, and it's positively vile.

The group also includes Davies (Harry Davenport), an elderly store owner who tries unsuccessfully to have the men brought back to town for a trial, and Sparks (Leigh Whipper), a negro preacher who acts as the moral conscience of the group.

Once the interrogation gets underway, there's a doomed, haunting feel to the movie, as the audience surely knows how things will end. Martin tries to reason with his captors, then pleads with them, and finally begs them. This draws a sharp retort from Darwell's character to "take it like a man."

The film ends on a bit of a false note, as Carter reads the letter Martin has written to his wife and children, asking them to forgive the men who murdered him in the name of justice. The language is rather highfalutin for a humble farmer, and it's doubtful any man not a living saint could summon that sort of big-hearted perspective a few minutes before is to die for a crime he had nothing to do with.

Still, "The Ox-Bow Incident" is a riveting story about how right and wrong are sometimes hard to distinguish, and why laws are necessary to keep justice out of the eager hands of the unruly mob.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Wing and a Prayer" (1944)

"Wing and a Prayer" would be little remembered as a rather standard World War II propaganda movie, except for a couple of things. The first is the absence of an obsessive focus on a disparate cast of characters with predictable geographic backgrounds and personalities -- the tough guy from New York, the laconic Texan, the All-American Midwesterner, etc. I've written before about my fatigue with the whole "swell bunch of guys" thing in war pictures.

What stands out more about this 1944 movie directed by Henry Hathaway is its innovative battle scenes. It combines some convincing footage of real planes photographed on an aircraft carrier with stock battle footage. For once, the stock stuff is actually blended well into the action, so the cutaway moment isn't totally obvious like it usually is when using canned stuff.

Even better are several scenes where Hathaway juxtaposed actors in the foreground against a background of battle footage. Though the combination isn't seamless, it was still impressive for its day -- perhaps one of the first uses of a "green screen" type of technology.

I was also impressed with a tactic employed by Hathaway during the climactic battle. Since it would have been unfeasible to depict a battle between American planes and Japanese carrier fleet while the war was still ongoing, the director cuts away to the captain on the bridge listening to the radio byplay among the pilots and their crewmen. He orders this piped through the ship's P.A. system, so we watch as the sailors react to the pilots' exultant shouts after shooting down a Zero, their screams of pain and their shouts suddenly being cut off.

At first I thought it to be a corny cost-saving measure, but Hathaway expertly manipulates the verbal diaspora so the audience feels like it's in the middle of the action, despite no corresponding visual element. One exchange is particularly memorable, as a pilot learns his gunner is paralyzed and cannot bail out as their stricken plane careens toward the ocean. "Guess we'll take this last ride together..."

Of course, it was probably not technologically possible to beam the entire radio transmissions of a flight of bombers throughout an aircraft carrier, and even if it was I seriously doubt a naval commanding officer would do so. But as I said, it makes for an effective narrative ploy.

"Wing and a Prayer" got its title from a hit song that came out in 1943, and its plot from a fictionalized version of events leading up from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of the Coral Sea and eventually the Battle of Midway. Sometimes subtitled "The Story of Carrier X," the film follows a single carrier as it runs a series of maneuvers meant to distract and misinform the Japanese high command into thinking the American Navy is dispersed and disorganized.

Their orders are simple: fly missions to look for the enemy, then run away as soon as they're spotted. Needless to say, the pilots are dismayed at fleeing from the enemy. Eventually, of course, they get to have their big fight.

An interesting thing about "Wing and a Prayer" is how subservient characterization is to the plot. If the theme of this movie, like many of its ilk, is that "we're all in this together," then it's underscored by having no one character stand out.

Dana Andrews is ostensibly the lead playing the redoubtable commander of the pilots, though a close second is Hallam "Oscar" Scott, a callow young pilot whose cocksure nature is not matched by his prowess at the plane's controls.

In an interesting ploy, Scott (William Eythe) is supposed to be a movie star who joined up to fight. He got his nickname from the Academy Award statue he won and carries with him in the cockpit as a good luck charm. The rest of the crew beg him for stories of kissing Betty Grable and other big Hollywood stars, and in one scene they watch one of her movies, "Tin Pan Alley."

The third lead is Bingo Harper, the taciturn flight commander played by Don Ameche. It's an unrewarding part, as Ameche scowls his way through the entire movie, his character's stubbornly by-the-book ways earning no adoration from the rowdy pilots. In the end he's portrayed as an honorable man of duty who sublimates his emotions to protect the entire ship.

Also notable in the sprawling cast is Charles Bickford as the grizzled captain, Kevin O'Shea as a veteran ace battling the shakes, Richard Jaeckel as an underage gunner and the inimitable Harry Morgan as a loudmouth ensign.

The planes used in the movie were SB2C Helldiver bombers and TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, sturdy little ships with a crew of three. Curiously, I noticed that the pilots fly almost the entire time with the glass cowl of their cockpit slid back, exposing them to the wind and elements. I suppose this must be historically accurate, since a contemporaneous movie made with the cooperation of the Navy surely wouldn't get such an important detail wrong.

3 stars out of four