Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Four Review: Cry 'Havoc'

War films about women that came out in the forties have one major leg up (no pun intended) on war films about men that came out around the same time: to put it simply, the women are allowed to hate each other. Perhaps it's because Hollywood viewed men and women so differently, or perhaps because they didn't want to confuse audiences by drawing a firm line between American soldiers and their enemies and then throwing too much inter-American conflict into the mix, but whereas the conflict between male soldiers is usually contained to big-topic disagreements about class or ethnicity (or something comparable), women in these sort of movies often dislike each other because, well, they just do. In some ways, this makes World War II films about women easier to understand today, because we're able to relate to them in a manner more intimate than history or war; it certainly helps Cry 'Havoc' and So Proudly We Hail!, two films released in 1943 that were based on the real-life ordeals of the nurses stationed in Bataan during the Japanese sweep down the Pacific during the early part of the war. Neither film pulls any punches in portraying the hardships the women face, but both also heavily concern themselves with the everyday drama between their characters.  

The main conflict in Cry 'Havoc' occurs between Ann Sothern's character Pat and...well, just about every other woman in her group of nurses, but especially Lieutenant Smith, played by Margaret Sullavan in her second-to-last film role. Pat is supposed to be a variation on the sort of tough-talking-broad-with-a-heart-of-gold Sothern frequently played during the early forties, but more often than not she just comes off as a bitch, as when she needlessly victimizes a former cosmetics saleswoman (Ella Raines) who's crumbling under the pressure of being a nurse. You see, the basic story in Cry 'Havoc' is that a rag-tag group of women have come to the island of Bataan to volunteer their services as army nurses, despite their not having any experience with medicine or the military, and Sothern's Pat has it out for just about everybody, from the fellow nurses she feels aren't rising to the occasion to the higher-ups -- like Lieutenant Smith -- who try to give her orders. Complicating matters further, she soon falls for Lieutenant Holt, the communications officer who also happens to be Lieutenant Smith's secret husband (secret because military regulations during WWII forbid fellow officers from marrying.)

Joan Crawdord allegedly turned down a role in Cry 'Havoc', dismissing it as "The Women Go to War," and she may have had a point: like The Women, the sharp-tongued 1939 comedy that costarred Crawford and explored the complex (and sometimes conniving) relationships between modern women, there are no male characters on-screen in Cry 'Havoc,' aside from a few dying soldiers; the oft-discussed Lt. Holt is only seen once, from a distance, and when he eventually dies and Lt. Smith and Pat are forced to come together in their mourning, we don't even have a face to attach to his name. This no-men gimmick works in The Women, where the way women pick at each other in regards to men is sort of the point, but in Cry 'Havoc,' it really only serves to bring the drama between the women so much into the foreground that the story consists of little else. War-related things occur, of course, and the ultimate point is that the women need to put their personal differences aside in order to be successful nurses, but when I think about Cry 'Havoc,' two things stick out to me: the women are tired (understandably), and Pat and Lt. Smith fight over a man.

So Proudly We Hail! has even more to do with war-time romance than Cry 'Havoc,' with separate storylines for lead actresses Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, and Veronica Lake, and yet it manages to mix the themes of love and war together in such a way that neither finds itself trumped by the other. The nurses in Hail! are just as prone to infighting as the women in Havoc, with Lake taking up the part of the odd woman out, who won't talk with the other nurses or even let them borrow her jewelry, but in a twist from the pattern set forth in Havoc, their bickering subsides as men enter the picture (literally, since we get to see the men here) and the rigors of war become more demanding. Ironically, the more the women talk about, think about, and interact with their men, the more we see them as people separate from their men, as flesh and blood humans with distinct personalities and motives, just as in real life. When we find out why Lake's character is so hostile to the other nurses, we have sympathy for her, or at least more sympathy than we can spare for Pat in Havoc when she realizes she's been throwing herself at another woman's husband.  

Hail is the lighter of the two films but also probably the better of the two, because despite its emphasis on romantic storylines, it has genuinely exciting and well-filmed battle scenes and keeps the story moving at a brisk but never skimpy pace, utilizing flashbacks along with a few surprise twists and deaths. Havoc started as a play and feels like a play, spending an inordinate amount of time in the women's bunker, and though its ending is more nihilistic and perhaps more realistic than the ending of Hail, it has far too many supporting characters, so many that by the film's conclusion I still couldn't identify some of the characters by face or name. (Hail keeps its focus on a select few and is all the better for it.) Cry 'Havoc' is quite a good movie, with an especially good performance from Margaret Sullavan, but it never strikes the right balance between humor, romance, action, and drama, whereas So Proudly We Hail! manages to meet all the criteria of a forties' war film while still adressing the specific concerns of the women it set out to portray.

Grade: B+