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James Cagney, who in his time had to plant fists or a grapefruit on young ladies' faces and shoes on young ladies' behinds, here develops his tenderest relationships with middle-aged ladies (the Misses George, Main and Hattie McDaniel), and each of them is worth a dozen average love scenes. Edward McNamara (an easygoing friend of the Cagneys whose fine, fresh tenor Caruso once coached and whom Madame Schumann-Heink once "discovered" as a caroling Jersey cop) is something new and convincing in villainy. He looks like neither a swindling person or the unconfessed byblow of a neanderthal rake, but like the sort of hard-soft, period Irishman he is supposed to be. Julia Heron's interiors look as if people really had lived in them. The direction (by skilled Oldtimer William K. Howard), the acting, the production are fluent, alert and reciprocal.
So Proudly We Hail (Paramount) enlists three of Paramount's brightest fe-.male stars (Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake) in a heartfelt, but highly fictional, tribute to the Army nurses of Bataan. The three leading ladies are so comely even in coveralls that, despite all the realistic shooting, they spend most of their time fighting a woman's war.
The story, told in flashback, reports the private and professional experiences of several nurses (Barbara Britton, Mary Servuss, et al.), three in particular, who reached the Philippines just in time for Bataan. Lieut. Davidson (Miss Colbert) does her best to liquidate her love for a Medical Corps Lieutenant (George Reeves) in the name of duty. She fails. Nurse O'Doul (Miss Goddard), a handsome 110-lb. of salt-of-the-earth with an incurable penchant for sheer black night gowns, kids around tenderly with a pleas ant ex-footballing Marine named Kansas (Newcomer Sonny Tufts). Nurse D'Arcy (Miss Lake), having seen her fiance killed at Pearl Harbor, is a personnel problem (see cut), interested in no men except Japanese, whom she is interested strictly in killing. She is removed from the story halfway through when, to ensure the get away of her sister nurses, she walks off with a grenade and detonates herself among the enemy. Nurses Colbert and Goddard carry on gallantly among bombed field hospitals and strafed wounded, until they are sent for greater safety to Corregidor. A further removal (to Australia) separates them from their romantic inter ests, who face imprisonment or death. In between love scenes that are not painfully overemphatic there are some very emphatic bombs, a shortage of food and medical supplies, and an abundance of nursely duties, which are sincere and effective though never seriously mistakable for the real thing.
Veronica Lake (with her hair up) makes a good deal of her short, tense visit to the film. Claudette Colbert most successfully sidetracks her prettiness for the more urgent priority of suggesting an exhausted young woman in coveralls. Paulette Goddard is easy to like in the fattest role in the film. She has a comic warmth and bounce reminiscent of the late Jean Harlow..Even easier to like is 4F (but outwardly rugged) Sonny Tufts, whose stumbling hands and voice develop wrinkles in the comedy of inarticulate love-making which are likely to become official among female cinemaudiences.