Men of the Fighting Lady

There are a pair of movies on the TCM schedule for tomorrow, January 10 that were on my DVR. Thankfully, one of them is in prime time, so I feel more comfortable putting the post for it up tomorrow morning. The first of the two movies is Men of the Fighting Lady, which you can see tomorrow at 5:00 PM.

The opening credits suggest that this is based on two stories, one true and the other one by James Michener. Because of this, to make the movie a bit more accessible, Michener has been turned into a sort of expository character, although Michener is sadly not playing himself. Instead, Michener is played by Louis Calhern. As the movie opens, he's being sent onto the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier fighting the Korean War toward the end of the war (the movie itself wasn't released until 1954, after the war had ended). There, he meets ship's doctor Kent Dowling (Walter Pidgeon), who has a story of a "Christmas Miracle" to tell Michener....

This being an aircraft carrier, the job of the men is to run bombing missions over North Korea. The main group among the men are Lt. Thayer (Van Johnson), a sort of second-in-command; Lt. Cmdr. Dodson (Keenan Wynn); and young Ens. Schechter (Dewey Martin). Actually coming up with the missions and flying along with the men is Lt. Cmdr. Grayson (Frank Lovejoy). Their mission is more or less the same one every day, which is to bomb a particular North Korean railhead. The reason it's the same railhead over and over is the no matter what the Americans do, the North Koreans and their allies seem to be able to repair the damage overnight.

One effect of this is that Grayson decides that the way to make the bombs more accurate is to drop them from a lower height. This increases the danger both in having to avoid mountains, but more importantly in being closer to the anti-aircraft positions. Indeed, the climax of the movie is going to come when Schechter gets hit, although before him Grayson also gets shot. In Grayson's case, he's able to fly the plane back out to the ocean, where he has to eject and be rescued -- quickly, because otherwise he's going to succumb to hypothermia what with the water temperature being only a few degrees above freezing.

There's quite a bit of stock footage here, both of the bombing raids over Korea as well as planes taking off and landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Those take-offs and landings are dangerous as well, and that's going to become a plot point in the movie along with planes getting shot down. The "Christmas miracle" involves Ens. Schechter, and his attempt to get back to the ship after his plane is shot.

Men of the Fighting Lady was apparently successful at the box office and garnered reasonably good reviews. These surprise me somewhat, as I wouldn't have thought a Korean War movie would be something to the public's taste in 1954. This wasn't quite the "good war" that World War II was. Also, Men of the Fighting Lady is little more than a programmer, padded out with that stock footage. It's not that Men of the Fighting Lady is a bad movie; it's more that it came across to me as pedestrian. Competently made, and the sort of thing that had it been made during and about World War II would have been seen as a morale-booster for the homefront before the following week's picture, but nothing more.