Soldiers in White

I recently watched my DVD of They Died With Their Boots On. The DVD has several extras including a couple of shorts. I already blogged about A Tale of Two Kitties; recently I watched the other short, Soldiers in White.

In a big-city hospital in the days just before the US entered World War II (the movie has a 1941 copyright but IMDb lists a 1942 release and the final scenes really imply extra footage was filmed after Dec. 7, 1941), Charles Anthony (John Litel) is a hospital chief of staff who is announcing to the new interns and nurses that he's going to be leaving the hospital to take on an important new task of joining the Army to train medics. One of the nurses is young Miss Ryan (Eleanor Parker in her movie debut), who decides that she too wants to join the Army. This is much to the chagrin of intern Johnny Allison (William T. Orr), who fancies himself a ladies' man and has been pursuing all of the nurses.

Wouldn't you know it, however, but Johnny gets drafted. Not that he takes the military seriously, as he sees it as an opportunity to keep pursuing Nurse Ryan. That is, until he gets in an accident that fractures his leg and leaves him laid up. That gives now Maj. Anthony the opportunity to have the sort of talk Judge Hardy would have had with Andy, and get Johnny to change his tune on a dime and learn to love Big Brother military life.

The movie concludes with a bunch of medics marching, with the stentorian tones of Warner Bros.' house announcer Knox Manning making Reed Hadley over at Fox look like a piker in terms of pushing the propaganda and stridency up to 11.

Soldiers in White is mildly interesting for Eleanor Parker, and the print on the DVD has extremely nice Technicolor photography for a short, since you'd think those would have gotten short shrift in the presentation department. But the plot is terrible, and there's a reason didn't become a star. (Orr did, however, go on to become executive producer of quite a few TV shows in the first two decades of network TV.) It's good to have this on a DVD as an extra, but it's not something I'd go out of my way to look for between movies on TCM if they were still listing their shorts in the online schedule.