Bright Victory

TCM is running a night of Arthur Kennedy movies tonight, starting at 8:00 PM with Bright Victory.

Kennedy plays Sgt. Larry Nevins, who at the opening of the film is seriving in the US Army's communications corps in North Africa in 1943. His current mission is to re-connect a forward outpost to the base well behind the lines. It's a dangerous mission, as shown by the fact that he and his two colleagues are stopped at a checkpoint and told there's no vehicles allowed forward of this point due to the road not being de-mined, which is a foreshadowing that the jeep is going to get mined. Still, Nevins bluffs his way through the checkpoint.

Amazingly, the jeep doesn't hit a mine. Instead, there are German snipers on the hills above, and they attack the three men in the jeep, wounding all of them and beating a hasty retreat. Sgt. Nevins has been hit in the head and his eyes have been covered, in preparation for transport back to the States where a better Army doctor can see what can be done to improve Nevins' condition.

As it turns out, when Nevins gets to the Army's Valley Forge Hospital in Pennsylvania, the doctors diagnose a severed optic nerve, which means permanent blindness. Nevins doesn't want to face this future at first, and certainly doesn't want to tell his parents (Will Geer and Nana Bryant). He's also worried about the woman who's going to become his fiancée, Chris (Julie Adams), whose father is the wealthy owner of a barrel factory in Nevins' small Florida home town.

But since there's nothing else to be done, Nevins sets about on his rehabilitation, which means learning to cope with his blindness. There are enough blind people at the army hospital that the locals are used to dealing with blind people, and one of the people Larry meets at the bar is Judy (Peggy Dow). He's gruff with her at first since the first time he meets her he's still not ready to deal with his blindness, but eventually he warms up, and Judy begins to feel that this one might really be the man for her, even though he's blind. Another person Larry meets is fellow blinded soldier Joe Morgan (James Edwards), who we can all see is black. Now that Larry is blind, he can't see that. But he grew up in a southern town where it was just accepted that blacks were second-class humans and casual racism was the norm, so Larry unsurprisingly screws up his friendship with Joe through his use of a racial slur.

Eventually, Nevins has to go home on a furlough as part of his rehabilitation, and he finds that things have changed. Everybody looks at him differently, and he himself has changed thanks in part to his interactions with Morgan. Will Nevins be able to become a productive member of society, and will he be able to find true love and happiness?

Bright Victory is a really good movie with wonderful performances from both Kennedy (who got his one Best Actor Oscar nomination to go with several Supporting Actor nominations; he never won) and Peggy Dow. The resolution of the story seemed to me to be a little too Hollywood happy, as I'd think Nevins would still have a very difficult road ahead of him, but it doesn't detract from the movie overall.

Bright Victory is a movie that deserves better recognition than it has, and as far as I know it's not on DVD at all, which is a huge shame. Tonight's TCM showing, and another one scheduled in November, are your few chances to catch this worthy movie.