Tender Comrade [1943] [DVD]Ginger Rogers (actor) Robert Ryan (actor)
Format: all-region dvd (worldwide) Runtime: 97 min Quality: Excellent.
A pregnant woman is left to cope alone when her husband is called up to fight in the Second World War. She starts work in an aircraft factory to do her bit, and moves into a house with three of her co-workers, who pool their resources to help one another while waiting for news from the front line. Drama, starring Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey, Patricia Collinge and Kim Hunter.
On the surface, a harmless enough tale about women living together while their menfolk are off to war, but this slight drama had serious repercussions. Ginger Rogers's mother objected to her daughter uttering the sentiment "Share and share alike" in the film, and four years later writer Dalton Trumbo and director Edward Dmytryk were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and imprisoned as "unfriendly" witnesses and alleged Communists, all because the women lived and worked communally in the movie! The fact "comrade" was in the title
didn't help either, even though it's taken from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. At least leading man Robert Ryan who plays Rogers's soldier spouse was not targeted despite his own left-of-centre sympathies, and he turns in a typically rock-solid performance. |