Ladies Courageous

Ladies Coragious Hay I saw B-17s, C-47s, B-25s, AT-6s, P-40s, B-24s, and a B26. That's why I watched the film in the first place - to see now vintage aircrafts. The rest of the film was very much like a soap opera. Loretta Young was stately and beautiful. She did a creditable job with a lacking script. Frank Jenks was annoying. His part could have been played by a younger actor. The reminder of the actors did their best with what they had.

The title "Ladies Courageous" is obviously inspired by the 1930s MGM film "Captains Courageous". However, instead this is the story of a group of women volunteers who served the armed forced by ferrying airplanes from the States to where ever they were needed--thus freeing up men to do the actual fighting. While the film is SUPPOSED to celebrate these women and SHOULD have been an advancement for the cause of equal rights, in many, many ways it seems to have the covert message "women really AREN'T as qualified as men". Why? Because too often these supposedly professional women act as if their every action is governed by feelings or raging hormones. Now don't get me wrong...I do NOT agree with this at all...but the film seems to constantly reinforce this idea because these supposedly smart women often act awfully dumb...and it's up to their Colonel (Loretta Young) to continually pick up the pieces and try to make the best of the many disasters caused by some of the women--particularly the Colonel's nutty sister. A truly weird film and one that should have inspired....not inspired laughter!

I am usually fairly charitable to flag waver movies made during WWII. Their purpose was more to demonstrate the sacrifice of our military and keep up the morale of the folks on the home front, than to entertain. I just watched LC on a DVD I bought off of eBay. It was hard to sit all the way through. It's more bad soap opera than flag waver. While the movie tries to show the bravery and sacrifice of the Women's Air Service Pilots (WASPs) it deals primarily with the emotional problems of the various women.

Loretta Young is well cast as Roberta Harper, the mother hen leader of the civilian female pilots. Geraldine Fitzgerald is her famous pilot sister, Virgie, who is as reckless as she is outspoken. Anne Gwynne, June Vincent, Diana Barrymore, and Evelyn Ankers, and a few others round out the female cast. The full cast is a large one and look fast for some soon to be familiar faces in small walk-on roles.

Virgie is so upset about the women not being military officers and not getting the recognition they deserve, that she deliberately crashes a badly needed P-38 as a publicity stunt. That's the sort of immature and over emotional reactions that these women demonstrate. Not exactly the sort of thing to inspire confidence as to what good pilots they are supposed to be. Roberta deals with all the others' problems while keeping her own inside. The flag waving gets lost amidst all the female turmoil going on.

LC is also hindered by the stilted way that Geraldine Fitzgerald and Diana Barrymore deliver their lines. They both sound more British than the All-American girls they are supposed to be portraying.

About 80 minutes into the movie, I thought it might have risen to at least be mediocre. Then came the ending. It is the most contrived Hollywood far-fetched ending that it could possibly be. The ending actually destroys whatever positive points that had been made bout the WASPs in the story. I won't spoil it, all I can say is that you have to see the ending to believe that's what the script writers came up with.

As the three previous reviewers have indicated, this is a pretty bad movie. Whether it is true that it was actually made to make the WASPS look bad, as claimed by one of those reviewers, I don't know. But it is certainly true that it makes some of the women pilots look selfish, over-emotional, etc. I don't ever recall once hearing any of the men in the movie comment on how good the women were at their job.

It's strange, frankly, that Hollywood would bother to make such a poor movie during the war. I just finished reading *Hollywood Goes to War*, which recounts how the Office of War Information (OWI) worked with the studios to put a positive face on just about every aspect of our involvement in the war - not always successfully, granted. It seems hard to imagine that Universal - which generally made horror flicks and musicals - would intentionally set out to scuttle the WASPs. But then, it also seems strange that Universal managed to get Loretta Young, then a big star, to appear in one of their movies.

I suspect there is some untold story here behind all this.

Nonetheless, this is a pretty poor movie. Unless you have an interest in seeing World War II aircraft, there's really not much point in watching it.