The Hasty Heart

A war is ending, and after months and possibly years of fighting, the light can be seen at the end of the tunnel. I can only imagine soldiers being so close to getting back home, only trying to make it through to the end safe and unscathed. What about those soldiers wounded and even killed in the closing days of a war? That would be the jumping off point for 1949's The Hasty Heart.

Serving in Burma in WWII with his Scottish regiment, Corporal Lachlan MacLachlan (Richard Todd) is wounded while on patrol and sent to a military hospital in the jungle. Shrapnel has torn up his kidney forcing doctors to remove it, but now his second kidney is showing signs of failure. Doctors only give him a few weeks to live but decide not to tell him. Instead, he's moved to another ward, this one run by Nurse Margaret Parker (Patricia Neal) with five international patients, soldiers from around the world, including Yank (Ronald Reagan).  The ward is asked to be kind and friendly to Lachlan, hopefully making the most of his last few weeks alive. Not knowing why his orders home are being held up, Lachlan isn't going to make it easy.

Based off a play from writer John Patrick, 'Hasty' is a great example of a play making the successful jump to film effortlessly. With a few quick departures outdoors, the entire movie -- at 102 minutes -- is set in the one ward occupied by Nurse Parker, Yank and four other recovering soldiers. It's easy to see this being a stage-based play. The story is a good one no matter whether it is a play or a film. Director Vincent Sherman personalizes the story as much as possible, bringing to life all the different characters and seeing their predicament. A little sappy, a little too sentimental at times maybe, but this isn't a cynical, world-weary look at the closing days and subsequent months following WWII. It is instead a story of the people involved, and the effect the war has had on them.

Earning a Best Actor nomination for the 1949 Oscars was an achievement in itself for actor Richard Todd, the only nomination he would get in an underrated career. Other performances from that year? Broderick Crawford in All the King's Men, Kirk Douglas in Champion, John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima, and Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High. Not bad, huh? In just his third credited role as an actor, Todd leaves his mark. His Lachie comes from a tough background where he's always dealt with ridicule and scorn, fighting for everything he's earned. When these other patients warm up to him -- despite everything he throws at them -- he's thrown for a loop. It is a beautiful performance, especially when he does open up to his fellow prisoners. Todd makes this character human where it wasn't human just minutes before. He didn't win the Oscar, losing to Crawford's much showier part, but it is a well deserved nomination.

What struck me as odd with the nomination is that Todd received third billing behind both Reagan and Neal in the cast. It is a leading performance, but one of three 'Hasty' offers. Any one of the three offers a performance that could carry a movie on its own. The future 40th President of the United States, Reagan takes his chance to act here and runs with it. He was in a lot of B-movies that didn't always offer him a chance to act. He was just himself, but his part as Yank, an American soldier recovering from a bout with malaria, the unofficial leader of the ward is a solid one and layered. Like the other patients, he's genuinely trying to befriend Lachie only to meet roadblock after roadblock. Neal is Neal, easily one of the most underrated actresses of her generation. Her Nurse Parker is the epitome of what a nurse should be. She's thoughtful, caring and willing to work at helping her patients even when they want nothing to do with her.

The other patients are an international group that reflect the wide-ranging melting pot that were the soldiers fighting in Burma in 1944 and 1945. The group includes Tommy (Howard Marion-Crawford), an overweight Brit who jokes about his weight, Kiwi (Ralph Michael), a New Zealander who wants to get home and see his newborn baby, Digger (John Sherman), the quiet Aussie, and Blossom (Orlando Martins), the African soldier who can't understand a word of English. I liked the dynamic among the group. It reflects a group that's been with each other for awhile now, friendships quickly forming in a trying situation. Anthony Nicholls plays Lt. Colonel Dunn, the commander of the hospital who makes the decision to not tell MacLachlan the news.

I wasn't sure how they were going to wrap up 'Hasty' with several options available. Do you show Lachie's death? Do you hold back and leave it up to us as an audience to imagine it? Or the worst option, do you swoop in at the end and save him, offering a kidney transplant? On that subject, the movie says it can't be done, but I thought you could transplant a kidney. Eh, what do I know, I'm writing movie reviews. The important point is that Sherman chooses the right option...whatever that might be. Sorry, no spoilers. It's a fitting, very moving ending, especially a simple gesture Reagan's Yank makes to the Scotsman. A great movie on the whole.

The Hasty Heart <---TCM clips (1949): ****/****

Desperate Journey

Before becoming one of the U.S.'s most popular presidents, Ronald Reagan made quite a name for himself in the 1930s and 1940s as a movie star. Makes that whole 'Star Wars' idea a little funnier if you ask me. He was usually limited to B-movies, but as an actor he had an easy-going, likable way about him on the screen. Reagan often played second banana to the main star of the movie and made a career -- a movie career at least -- at playing the funny sidekick.

By 1942, Reagan had already teamed once with Errol Flynn in 1940's Santa Fe Trail when they teamed up again for a WWII adventure, 1942's Desperate Journey, that is pretty blatant propaganda watching it now over 70 years later. It's not subtle in the least, and why should it be? Released in September 1942, the U.S. was only a few months removed from entering the war in the North African campaign, and maybe the home front needed some boosting. That propaganda borders on the painfully unfunny at times, but the movie itself is interesting enough to recommend.

Flying a dangerous mission to take out a German railroad yard, Flight Lieutenant Terry Forbes (Flynn) is forced to take command when the commander is killed. Forbes' bomber is able to take out the objective, but the plane is shot down in the process, and it's not long before German forces have scooped them up. The five crew survivors are interrogated by an SS major (Raymond Massey), but they manage to escape with key information about underground Messerschmidt factories. Among the group is a Scottish veteran of WWI (Alan Hale), a cocky American navigator (Reagan), an American flight officer (Arthur Kennedy), and a young British officer (Ronald Sinclair) trying to live up to his father's reputation. Can the five somehow get back to England with their news before the Germans catch them again?

The whole premise is pretty ridiculous and far-fetched in itself but it's entertaining enough. Flynn's Forbes is pretty gung-ho as the flight lieutenant who wants to take the war right at the German war effort. He's a leader who questions himself because the actions he undertook ended up taking the lives of some of his crew, but Flynn is also Joe America (even though he was Australian), the ideal soldier to lead the fight against the Nazis. With his gung-ho attitude, Flynn isn't content with just getting the news back to England, wanting to sabotage anything he can on the way back.

A reviewer at IMDB does point out that the Germans are rather cartoonish or particularly evil with little middle ground, asking where are Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Hogan's Heroes reference there for you. Their efforts are pretty clumsy in capturing the prisoners as it seems Massey's German major is the only one actually taking part in the chase. For five prisoners with news that could cripple the Germans, wouldn't more people join in the effort? Flynn and Co. even make it across Germany and into the Dutch countryside with little issue or much in the way of danger...and in German uniforms at that, even boarding Goerring's private train at one point.

Now all that said, the movie is incredibly entertaining, a good old-fashioned popcorn movie. The action is exciting -- especially the last half hour as the Germans close in -- including a car chase across the empty Dutch countryside with some boats of cars chugging along. Credit for making it so damn entertaining is the casting, especially Flynn as a WWII version of a swashbuckler who even manages to flirt some with a comely resistance fighter (Nancy Coleman). Reagan and Hale go for the laughs, hamming it up in some scenes that are hard to watch they feel so out of place. Kennedy is the straight man trying to keep the mission on the others' minds.

As for the propaganda, there's several scenes of dialogue where the cast is talking directly to the viewer. Coleman's resistance fighter tells Flynn (and American) to tell everyone that there's people fighting back against the Axis powers and don't forget about them. Flynn's final line is almost laughable "Now for Australia and a crack at those Japs!" but at the time I'm sure it probably drew some cheers from audiences. It's all part of this ridiculously over the top, far-fetched action adventure that is entertaining almost in spite of itself.

Desperate Journey <-----trailer (1942): ***/***