The Heat's On

Back in the spring of 2025, Mae West was honored as TCM's Star of the Month, even though she didn't make all that many movies. I didn't have much to record, in part because of a box set of hers that I have that has a lot of her stuff from Paramount and TCM's not showing her two 1970s movies. However, before decamping from Hollywood, West made one film at Columbia that was part of the salute: The Heat's On.

Mae West plays Fay Lawrence, the sort of Broadway star loosely based on West herself: for the grown-up audience, but doing the sort of show that some of the more prudish types would consider controversial. With changing times and it being World War II, however, the new show for producer Tony Ferris (William Gaxton) has been a box office flop, and Fay is thinkng of using a clause in the contract to get out of the show so she can do something with rival producer Forrest Stanton (Alan Dinehart) instead. Fay, frankly, is sick of Ferris and his bend-the-rules ways.

Wanting to see Ferris after the show is Hubert Bainbridge (Victor Moore). He works in the supply department of the Bainbridge Foundation, one of those famously prudish moral uplift societies reminiscent of the one Ezra Ounce in Dames a decade earlier was a part of. But Hubert doesn't actually run it; that job falls to his sister Hannah. The two of them have a niece Janey who has some musical and dance talent, and Hubert would like Ferris to give Janey an audition.

Ferris isn't pleased with this intrusion at first, until he realizes Hubert is from the Bainbridge Foundation and what they have a reputation for. The Bainbridge Foundation can get the show raided and shut down without Ferris having to pay off Fay's contract. And then, when Fay starts working with Stanton, Ferris sets about manipulating Hubert to get back at Stanton. Fortunately for Ferris, Hannah has gone off to Seattle for two months to preside over a conference of the foundation's western branch or something. Ferris sees how weak-willed Hubert is, and uses that to get Hubert to do all sorts of things that are dishonest at best and highly illegal at worst, which of course brings up the question of how Hubert is going to get out of this movie both satisfying the Production Code, and staying out of prison.

For most of this section of the movie, Fay is not really a part of the movie, at least not on screen. But then she learns that Ferris has used Hubert to get control of Stanton's musical that she's in, and she takes pity on Hubert and cooks up a scheme of her own to get back at Ferris and have a happy ending.

Having watched The Heat's On, I can see why Mae West got out of movies after this and why this one isn't very well remembered. If it hadn't starred Mae West, it's the sort of movie that would probably have a reputation for a second-tier movie designed to entertain the home front during World War II by not actually making much reference to the war. (Lloyd Bridges has an early role as a solder boyfriend to Janey, and Hannah is asked whether her trip to Seattle is really necessary, but that's about it.) Mae West is terribly underused and doesn't have the best one-liners her. Also, most of the music is forgettable, with the exception of Hazel Scott, the black pianist who is quite good.

The Heat's On is for Mae West completists only, I think. Well, maybe for Lloyd Bridges completists too.

The tower of whiteness

Another movie that I recorded some time back and has been sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch it and do a post on it for the next airing is The White Tower. That next airing comes tomorrow, Sept. 17, at 8:45 AM, so today the post on it goes up.

The movie opens with a Carla Alten (Alida Valli) returning to the village of Kandermatt, Switzerland (IMDb says that, like The Passionate Friends, France is actually standing in for Switzerland here), not having been here since the war some years back. Andreas (Oskar Homolka) at the local inn recognizes her and likes her, but a lot of the other people in town aren't thrilled to see her, at least the mountain guides. It's revealed that Carla's father tried to climb the "White Tower", the mountain overlooking Kandermatt, before the war when Carla was last here with him, only to die in the attempt, which is why nobody involved with mountaineering wants to have anything to do with her.

An international cast of stock character types is spending time at the hotel: Martin Ordway (Glenn Ford) fought in the European theater of World War II, getting shot down and escaping to Switzerland, which is why he enjoys Kandermatt: it's a refuge where he doesn't have to face real life. Hein (Lloyd Bridges) is a German who was obviously a Nazi in the war; the first time we see him he's shirtless and obviously showing off his Aryan physical superiority. Dr. Radcliffe (Cedric Hardwicke) is a British geologist, and much too old to try to make the climb. Finally, there's DeLambre (Claude Rains), an alcoholic Frenchman who's come to Kandermatt to finish his latest book.

Carla needs an expedition of at least four people to do the climb, preferably six. But whom to pick? Carla doesn't particularly care for Hein, and with good reason, but he's also the best provisioned person in town. Ordway doesn't really want to go up the mountain, but eventually changes his mind because he's just so gosh darn in love with Carla, because there's another plot point we've never seen in a movie like this. Of course, the other men are all too old, but eventually all of the men join Carla, because why else would they be in the movie?

The expedition starts off well enough, and they make reasonably good time at least why they're going through the meadows and the lower climbs of the mountain that aren't so steep. But eventually they start getting to steeper sections where ropes are necessary, as well as portions that are more like rock climbing than mountain climbing. And wait until they get to the snow. As you might guess, with a bunch of disparate character types, there's going to be conflicts that open up between various characters. Will they be able to make it to the top? Will they be able to get back down if they do get to the top?

The White Tower is a nice enough looking movie, although heaven knows that it's formulaic. You get the feeling that RKO either had blocked funds they had to use in Europe, or were trying to lure some famous names with the promise of a working holidy in Europe. The White Tower isn't a terrible movie, but apart from the visuals it's not exactly a great movie either.

Paddy Chayefsky channels Tennessee Williams

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies with screenplays by Paddy Chayefsky. One that I hadn't seen before was The Goddess, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in 1930, in the non-urban part of Maryland. Laureen Faulkner is a woman who got married much too young, and had a daughter not long after getting married. She feels herself unable to take care of the daughter, so she basically fobs the little girl, Emily, off on relatives who are strict Seventh Day Adventists. Emily can't get any love from them, in a scene where we see the juvenile Emily (Patty Duke in a one-scene role) tell the cat she got a promotion to the next grade.

We soon move to 1942. Emily is now about 16 years old and, still having no love from her family, prefers the fantasy world of Hollywood as well as going to the movie theater with boys who at least pay her some attention. And then, one night, she and some other high school kids run into a group of GIs, this being World War II after all. One of the GIs is a guy named John Tower (Steven Hill), who is the son of a famous Hollywood star but a man who couldn't handle the fame of having a famous Hollywood father. Emily doesn't much care; she's just taken with somebody who has a proximity to fame. She immediately falls for John, and the two quickly get married.

Unfortunately, Emily learns that she's way too much like her own mother. Emily gets pregnant and has the kid, but being a mother at such a young age is putting a decided crimp in the lifestyle of partying that she really wants. She doesn't want to be stuck in a small town. So one day she pretty much leaves the kid with her husband and leaves for Hollywood, because that's where the action is supposed to be.

Emily starts working her way up the ladder, having taken on the stage name of Rita Shawn. She's getting roles, and hopes to be able to impress her mother. Meanwhile, hanging on in Hollywood is retired boxer Dutch Seymour (Lloyd Bridges). He and Emily meet, and the two fall in love and get married. But he has the idea of going back to his home town to work in the family business, which is something Emily doesn't want to do since she still wants the fame and to be the center of attention.

So the two divorce, and Emily stays in Hollywood, where she does become a star, only to find that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. She turns to drinking, becoming the sort of star all the producers worry can no longer do what's necessary to get a movie done on time and under budget.

You can be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of movie that doesn't have much original to it. You can also be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of material that could have been written by Tennessee Williams, if he moved his action out of the South. As such, The Goddess isn't really a movie that you watch for the story. Instead, it's more of a vehicle for Kim Stanley, who had been big on Broadway but didn't make a whole lot of movies. Even in spite of the trite material, Stanley is someone you can't really take your eyes off of, giving a ridiculous and memorable performance.

As a coherent whole, The Goddess isn't the greatest movie. Yet there's still something compelling about it.

The sun around a walk

One of the movies that TCM seems to show fairly often when they need something for the Memorial Day or Veteran's Day programming blocks is A Walk in the Sun. I hadn't actually seen it before, so this year I made it a point to watch to be able to do a review on it here.

The action takes place in late 1943, as the Allies are about to make the jump to the European continent by invading Sicily after which they will work their way all the way up the peninsula. The story deals with one small platoon's place in that invasion. They're waiting to make the sea crossing, and it's not an easy one since the Axis powers know it's coming and have defensive weaponry ready to try to repel it. Indeed, one of the shots from the shore severely injures the head of the platoon, forcing them to select a new commander, who also gets killed fairly early on. Ultimately Staff Sgt. Tye (Dana Andrews) is going to lead the platoon.

Their objective is a bridge that crosses a river on a key road that the Axis powers have been using to transport troops, so their job is to destroy that bridge until the Allies can secure the area and replace the bridge. However, the bridge is guarded, more or less, by a farmhouse that holds the high ground in the area, and the Germans and Italians are sure to have a lot of men stationed there.

But to be honest, the mission is more of a macguffin as the movie is really about the men themselves and how they react to being in war and the stresses that produces, and how they deal with that stress. If you're looking for action, there's not all that much, although there is an assault on the farmhouse at the end. This may disappoint some viewers.

On the other hand, he have a cast of people who were all relatively early in their careers, with some going on to pretty big things (Lloyd Bridges and Dana Andrews), while others did well but achieved varying degrees of stardom (Richard Conte and John Ireland. Sterling Holloway is probably the veteran of the cast as a medic embedded with the platoon who gets killed off early.

So is A Walk in the Sun a good movie? I'd say it depends on what sort of movie you're looking for. There are those who say that war is a lot of hurry up and wait, with short bursts of action punctuating long periods of nothing much happening. If you're up for that and a movie with an ensemble cast, then I think you'll definitely like A Walk in the Sun.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls

A couple of months back, TCM ran the interesting movie The Whistle at Eaton Falls. I had seen that it was scheduled for a Blu-ray release, but I thought the first time I checked, that release was supposed to come in mid-March. Then I checked again, and thought I saw a late March release date, and in late March saw an April 12 release date. Apparently, it's now listed as getting its release on April 15. But since I watched it over the weekend in anticipation of doing a post today, that's the post you're getting.

The opening titles point out that it's produced by Louis de Rochemont, with a story from real life. Now, apparently I haven't mentioned de Rochemont on the blog before, but a bit of introduction to him should tell you the sort of movie you're going to get. Louis de Rochemont apparently got access to a movie camera in the late 1910s, filming the people and places around him. In the 1930s, he started producing the famous newsreel series The March of Time, which were different from other newsreels, in that they were two reels and focused on one story, rather than about a minute per event as other newsreels did. De Rochemont also used dramatic reconstructions of events, which might be controversial, since that technically makes a lot of the "news" not real.

By the mid-1940s, de Rochemont was interested in producing feature films, with the first being the interesting docudrama The House on 92nd Street. He would go on to produce several more docudramas, as well as movies that were slightly further afield from the docudrama, The Whistle at Eaton Falls being in that latter category.

The setting is Eaton Falls, NH, which is a company town. Well, not quite at the beginning, when it's a two-company town. The titular whistle is on the roof of the Granite State Shoe Co., but thanks to rising prices and the same forces that spelled doom for a lot of the mill towns in New England, the shoe company is forced to shut down, putting a lot of people out of work and leaving Doubleday Plastics as the town's biggest employer by far.

Doubleday is not immune to the same economic pressures that closed down Granite State, and Daniel Doubleday, president of the company, calls in the head of the labor union, Brad Adams (Lloyd Bridges), to discuss the problem. In order to cut costs, Doubleday would like to invest in new capital that will increase productivity, which of course means fewer workers to produce the same output. Doubleday's hope is that this will eventually result in more contracts for lower-priced output, eventually allowing everybody to return to work. But the key word is eventually. There would have to be some layoffs that would hopefully be temporary. Brad points out that the union would have to approve the use of the new machines per the contract, but is going to face trouble. He's got some hotheads in the union like Al Webster (Murray Hamilton). On managment side, there's Doubleday's second-in-command Dwight Hawkins (Russell Hardie), who is notoriously anti-union.

Brad is in a difficult situation. He's the one man in the union that the other workers trust, but the economic pressures should be evident, especially considering the recent closure of the other major employer in town. But things are about to get a whole lot more difficult for Brad. In order to try to drum up business, Mr. Doubleday goes on a business trip to meet with the other side of a major production contract. But the plane crashes, killing Mr. Doubleday. Now, the lawyers and bankers want Mrs. Doubleday (Dorothy Gish) to sell and live a comfortable retirement. She, however, doesn't want that, since she knows it would kill the company and put her fellow townsfolk out of work. So she comes up with a radical and risky idea: make Brad the new general manager at the company!

So now Brad gets to see the other side of business. When he goes to keep the appointment that killed his boss, the factory owner on the other side tells him, what would you do if you were in my position? It's not good news for Brad, but it's the obvious answer. And then there's the bidding for plastic buttons for Navy uniforms, which is a brutal process with the low bidder getting the contract period.

Finally, when all seems lost, Brad gets a brilliant idea: have the plastic cutter be part of the same machine as the molder, a process heretofore done by hand because nobody's been able to overcome the technical difficulties. Somehow, he and his assistants are successful. But the companie he's going to sell to has hired Hawkins on, and Hawkins figures out what's going on. So he's going to go to Eaton Falls to rile up the union to get them to reject the deal, so that Doubleday can go out of business and his new company can buy up the machines cheaply.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls is an interesting story, albeit one that seems like a junior high level of sophistication in dealing with complicated issues. Brad Adams gets to see both sides of the problem and finds that -- golly gee, management is just as difficult as labor! Everybody is also either a little too good or a little too bad. But it's a fairly unique story for Hollywood of that period, and it's helped by location shooting and capable acting, not just from Bridges, but many of the supporting stars, some who would go on to a lot bigger things. Anne Francis has a small role as the daughter of one of Brad's older co-workers, while playing one of Brad's co-workers and friends is Ernest Borgnine a couple of years before he became a star.

The Rainmaker (1956)

Katharine Hepburn had a day in Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the chance to record one of her movies I hadn't blogged about before, The Rainmaker. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

Although Hepburn is one of the stars, it's the other one that we see first. That would be Burt Lancaster, playing "Tornado" Bill. Bill is one of those itinerant carnival con-artist types, going around places in the Great Plains around 1930 selling what he claims is a device that will stop tornadoes from destroying the local small towns where he stops. (The movie doesn't specify when it's set, although Bill has a horse-drawn cart while several characters have cars, with the newest according to IMDb being a 1930 model.) Bill has also developed a fairly obvious reputation as a con artist, and somebody in town recognizes him, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat. (Amazingly, the police don't impound his cart.)

Cut to a town in the west half of the Kansas prairie where the welcome sign has been edited to say it used to be a bustling place until the drought came. They're holding a charity dance to raise money for the farmers affected by the drought; outside the building is the car of one Snookie Maguire (Yvonne Lime), who is apparently from a wealthy family if she can afford such a car. She's pursued by young Jim Curry (Earl Holliman), youngest kid in a family that has a farmhouse just outside of town, with older brother Noah (Lloyd Bridges), father H.C. (Cameron Prud'homme), and much older sister Lizzie (that's Katharine Hepburn, as if you couldn't tell).

Lizzie isn't home when we first meet the family. That's becaue they sent her away to visit relatives. Of course, the real reason was the hope that perhaps one of the cousins, or perhaps somebody in their town, would take a liking to Lizzie and ask her to marry him. She's getting up there in years (Hepburn was 49 when she made the movie, although I don't think Lizzie was supposed to be quite that old), and worried about becoming a spinster. And what is the rest of the family going to do with her if she does become a spinster aunt?

Meanwhile, Dad is also thinking that perhaps Lizzie could be married off to sheriff's deputy File (Wendell Corey), who is at first thought to be a widow although he is in fact a divorcé. It's one of the few times in the movies that Wendell Corey would actually be the right romantic partner for the lead actress, although it does seem clear that this would be a marriage of convenience at first and the two would have to learn to love each other. But Lizzie and File both seem like the sort of people who could ultimately learn that. Noah, however, is nasty enough that he suggests to Dad that nobody would ever marry Lizzie.

Enter Bill, now calling himself Bill Starbuck. Seeing that this town is suffering through a drought, he styles himself as a rainmaker, whose devices can bring rain if only you follow his convoluted method that he really just made up on the spot. For some inexplicable reason, Lizzie falls in love with the excitement that Starbuck brings -- she seems smart enough that she should see right through Starbuck's con-artist bluster. Maybe it's just that she's so desparate. Starbuck doesn't dislike Lizzie at all; in fact he seems to like someone so smart. But he's also one of those people who just can't settle down, and you know Lizzie wouldn't really belong with him. Never mind that the law in other states wants to find and prosecute Starbuck.

I had some big problems with The Rainmaker, and in reading the IMDb reviews, I see that the issues I had are ones I'm not alone in having. One is that Hepburn is miscast, as she's clearly too old to be a sibling to Jim (Hepburn was 21 years older than Holliman and six older than Bridges). Then there's the way Starbuck is written. He's just so obnoxiously over the top in his cons that I wanted to see him get smacked. It works for some other roles, but not here.

The Rainmaker was based on a stage play, and that's extremely obvious from the direction that we get here. It also doesn't help that the outdoor scenes look to have been don on a soundstage. Maybe some of the town square scenes were done on the back lot, but that's about it. The staginess doesn't much help the movie. Perhaps the script would work better on the stage. That having been said, the actors all try their darndest with the material, and the color cinematography is nice for the soundstage.

So some people might like The Rainmaker, but I have to admit that if I were looking to introduce people to any of the actors in the movie, this isn't the film I'd pick.

The Limping Man

Back in the 1950s, it wasn't uncommon for British studios to bring over a second-tier Hollywood actor and give them the lead in a movie in order to make it easier for the studio to get somebody back in the US to pick the movie up for distribution. Recently, I watched another such movie off of the Mill Creek box set I've mentioned a couple of times in the past. That film is The Limping Man.

The American star in question is Lloyd Bridges. He plays Franklyn Pryor, who served in the US Army back in the War and now, several years later, is flying back to Londo to meet the woman he had a relationship with back then, Pauline French (Moira Lister), in the hopes that he can rekindle that relationship. This was the era when flying was in some ways more glamorous, but in other ways just simpler, such as all the passengers walking across the tarmac to get to the terminal. Franklyn was sitting next to one Kendall Brown on the plane, and as they're walking across the tarmac, a sniper shoots Kendall dead!

Oh dear, poor Franklyn is going to have to delay his meeting with Pauline since he's going to have to deal with the police, being a witness to the crime after all. They'll want to know his whereabouts and whatnot if they need more information from him. And, unsurprisingly, they think he might know more than he's letting on.

Eventually he's able to get in touch with Pauline, and he finds that all is not going as well as he might have thought, which should be expected since the war ended quite some time back. The bigger problem is the way in which things aren't going well. Pauline, it turns out, started a relationship with Kendall what with Franklyn benig back in America, and that will give the police more reason to suspect either Pauline or Franklyn in the killing of Kendall.

There's also a motive, in that somebody was blackmailing Pauline since she and Kendall were involved in shady business of getting around the rationing that was still going on in the UK until the early 1950s, by using Pauline's boat to stock up on cargo from across the Channel in order to resell it.

Fortunately, however, the police have evidence that suggest the killer might have walked with a limp. But then, there are a whole bunch of characters who seem to have a lime, or could just be faking it to try to throw the police off the trail of the killer, much like wearing a bad wig.

The plot could take The Limping Man in any number of directions, but the way in which it ultimately does take it is something that I won't mention other then to say there's a reason everybody on IMDb who reviews the movie mentions the ending even if they don't spoil exactly what it is. The Limping Man is an interesting enough premise, competently acted, until that ending.

The print on the Mill Creek DVD is understandably not particularly great, considering how much you're paying for it, but I wonder how good any of the prints are since this was not a prestige movie and not from a big British studio. So take what you can get, enjoy the first 80 or so minutes, and forget that the ending the studio has is the one that they do.

Moonrise

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching to try to free up some space on my DVR is Moonrise.

In a prologue, we see the silhouette of a man being hanged for murder, while kids beng kids, taunt the son of the hanged man, Danny Hawkins. For whatever reason, these kids being kids are far worse than in real life, and the taunting continues into adulthood, as they all believe that Danny has "bad blood". The taunting is led by Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges), a man that as it turns out a lot of people have a reason not to like.

One person, however, who doesn't seem to dislike Jerry is local teacher Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell). She was all set to get married to Jerry, while Danny kind of likes her. At a dance, Jerry teases Danny one time too many, and and Danny responds by picking up a rock and hitting Jerry with it. Unfortunately, this is enough to kill Jerry, and in a panic, Danny doesn't know what to do, although he's fortunate that the exchange took place in a swamp so nobody will find the body for quite some time. The bad news is that Danny accidentally left his pocket knife at the scene, and it's a very distinctive knife.

With Jerry out of the way, Danny tries being nice to Gilly, and she likes his niceness. But Danny is also racked by guilt, and to be fair, he probably should since he killed a guy, even if the guy was a fairly distasteful person. Danny's guilt causes him to do some rather nasty things like get in a car accident, kick a hound dog that finds Jerry's body, strangle the deaf-mute (Harry Morgan) who finds the pocketknife, or jump off a Ferris wheel because he thinks the sheriff is on to him.

Eventually, the sheriff does figure things out, but this is an odd little backwoods Virginia town in that the sheriff and others have weird views of justice and salvation based on 19th century romanticism. Danny doesn't really have bad blood, you see, since the killing Dad committed was understandable: a doctor's malpractice led to the death of Danny's mom, and Dad killed the doctor in a revenge killing, and turned himself in. If only Danny can turn himself in in the same way, and not all handcuffed and everything, perhaps the jury will have mercy on him. (We don't actually get to the trial and justice portion of the story, since that would have required the movie to adhere to the Production Code.)

Moonrise is an odd little movie, in that it seems more about the visuals, and in some ways a psychological look at the main character, than it does about the actual story, which is fairly pedestrian. Physically it's a nice movie to look at, if you can overlook that story. Dane Clark isn't the world's best actor by any stretch of the imagination, and while he doesn't do badly, many of the supporting actors are just as much worth watching. I haven't mentioned Rex Ingram, as one of those solitary wise black men, along the lines of Juano Hernandez in Stars in My Crown. Ethel Barrymore has one scene as Danny's grandmother and unsurprisingly nails it.

If you're in the mood for something slightly off Hollywood normal, but not too far off, then Moonrise is definitely worth a watch.

Home of the Brave

Some weeks back, TCM brought in frequent guest co-host Donald Bogle to present a night of movies about movies from 1949 dealing with racial issues alongside Ben Mankiewicz. One of the movies they showed was one I hadn't blogged about before, Home of the Brave. So I recorded it, and having a long weekend for Christmas, sat down to watch it and do a post on here.

The movie opens on a Pacific island during World War II, where a couple of soldiers are discussing a mission they were on and how one of the other soldiers on the mission, Pvt. Peter Moss (James Edwards) is being seen by an army psychiatrist (Jeff Corey) because the mission left Moss with psychosomatic paralysis.

Flash back to before the mission. This is a voluntary mission to go to a neighboring island and survey it as part of the advance against the Japanese. Maj. Robinson (Douglas Dick) is in command, and has already brought in cartographer Finch (Lloyd Bridges), and soldiers Sgt. Mingo (Frank Lovejoy) and Cpl. T.J. Everett (Steve Brodie). The only surveyor who volunteered for the mission is Moss, who happens to be black.

This of course was set during World War II, which was before President Truman integrated the military, so having a black guy be part of the mission was going to controversial in any case, but making it voluntary is a way to get around any possible issues of historical inaccuracy. As for the four soldiers, Finch and Moss went to high school together and were basketball teammates, so he's supposedly the one guy who isn't supposed to have any racist views. The Major and Mingo are both trying to do their jobs, but growing up in a segregated country, they of course have bigoted attitudes in the back of their mind. T.J., however, has them in the front of his mind. Moss, understandably, carries a lot of resentment, expecting every white person to be racist to him.

Still, since Robinson is trying to be professional and there is a mission to carry out, he's going to try do the best he can with the volatile situation he's been given. Mingo gets shot in the shoulder, and is eventually going to have to have his arm amputated. But things get worse when Finch calls Moss a "ni-", stopping himself before finishing the word although everybody knows what he was going to say and Moss knows what even Finch was thinking. Just after this, Finch gets shot as well, telling Moss to keep on with the mission which is more important.

Moss is beside himself over not being able to save Finch, but eventually takes the maps back to the beach since that's the mission. Finch wasn't killed by the Japanese shot, instead getting captured and tortured by the Japanese, and that is what brings about Moss' paralysis.

The story of the mission presented in Home of the Brave is interesting enough on its own, with the social commentary of racism adding an element that makes the movie more worth a watch. Apparently, the movie is based on a play where the social element was anti-Semitism, but since Hollywood had already covered that topic with Crossfire and Gentlemen's Agreement, the topic got changed to racism. This gave James Edwards his first big role, and he shines, although the supporting cast is mostly good even if the characters all might seem a bit formulaic 70 years on.

One thing that bothered me was the ending, which seemed a bit too pat and happy, and not like what might have happened in real life back in World War II. Neither Mingo nor Moss would have had a completely changed world view like what the movie implies. I noticed it right away watching the movie, and Bogle pointed it out in the post-movie commentary with Ben Mankiewicz. But the question of how we get to a point where the sort of reconciliation Mingo and Moss had might actually be realistis was left unanswered.

So, although Home of the Brave definitely has its flaws, it's still more than worth a watch. The TCM Shop does list is as being available on DVD.