In Harm's Way

Before we'd even started watching In Harm's Way, Dad was telling me the story he'd heard about how the director, Otto Preminger, nearly got beaten up by Robert Mitchum once. Mitchum was starring in a film with Jean Simmons that Preminger was directing (my guess is Angel Face), and the director was trying to get Simmons to cry. By repeatedly slapping her. Either Mitchum came in while this was in progress, or got sick of it, but he basically told Preminger if he'd did it again he'd be sorry. Apparently it wasn't enough of stumbling block to keep Mitchum and Preminger from working together on River of No Return about 3 years later.
Two things about In Harm's Way. One, it's long. Almost 3 hours, and it really feels like it sometimes. I would have been content for it to end about an hour earlier. Two, it's quite the cast. John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Burgess Meredith, Carrol O'Conner, Henry Fonda's in there for about 10 minutes, Patricia Neal's familiar to me somehow, but I can't figure out from what. Oh, she was in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still, that what I recognized her from.

I feel silly saying this for a movie released 45 years ago, but SPOILERS!

The starts the day before Pearl Harbor, runs through that attack, as we see Rockwell Torrey (Wayne), whose ship was out of the Harbor, try to lead some other ships in hunting down the Japanese fleet. To get the most out of his fuel, he opts not to zig-zag, which gets his ship hit with a torpedo, which gets him behind a desk. He meets Maggie (Neal), a head nurse, and learns her roommate Annalee is dating his son, Jene, a lieutenant on a torpedo boat. The son he hasn't seen in at least 15 years, which makes their interactions pretty awkward. The fact his son's getting out of being on a ship to serve as an aide to a Congressman Owens who left office to grandstand as a "Commander" doesn't help. Eventually, Rock gets promoted to Rear Admiral and put in charge of an operation to take some islands, where he runs into his son and this troublemaking politician again, and his second in command Eddington still hasn't really dealt with the emotional fallout of his wife's infidelity and death. So people's personal lives go down the tubes even as the military aspects seem to go well.

Preminger seems to like to play with things that way. Eddington dies providing intel on Japanese ship movements, but this comes after he rapes Annalee*, which leads to her suicide. My theory was he didn't really want to be put on trial so he went, knowing the plane didn't have enough fuel to get back (they'd been pleading with command for a long-range recon plane, to no avail). My dad thinks he did it because somebody had to, and it might as well be him. It's true Eddington didn't care about his military career, but that doesn't mean he'd want to go to prison.

Then there's Jene, who eventually turns against the politician and returns to motor torpedo boats. This comes after Eddington suggested Rockwell wasn't actually Jene's father, because Jene stuck up for Owens. That's before the rape and suicide, fyi. I thought it rather curious Jene would take that rebuke and choose to go back to MTBs, but I think it's meant to be that he saw the respect his father commanded and how he earned it, versus Owens, and that tipped the balance. At any rate, Jene dies in the big naval battle. You could say he died a hero, since he took command of the boat after his superior officer was killed. It could also be argued he didn't care much, with Annalee gone, and of course, if he'd stuck with Owens, instead of trying to live up to his father's image, or the image men like Eddington have of his father, he'd have been fine.

As for Rockwell himself, he was put behind a desk for being too aggressive, and getting his cruiser damaged. In the climactic battle, he loses seven ships (and I don't know if that includes the torpedo boats or not), but because they did enough to drive off the battleship Yamato, he's getting put in charge of a big fleet, once they attach a peg where his leg used to be, anyway. Admittedly, the Admiral who told him he'd face a court of inquiry for that first incident said that if he'd waited until they were fully into the war, he'd be rewarded for that aggressiveness, and it turns out that was true. Still, it seems strange he gets a reward after losing a lot more men for trying to fend off a considerably more powerful force than he did for simply trying to extend his ship's range. Of course, the tradeoff is he lost most of his close friends in the battle, and his son, but he and Maggie seemed to have formed a strong bond, so I don't know if it all balances out.

* Because she and Jene had broken up, and she and Eddington met, but then she and Jene got back together, and were engaged, but she didn't tell Eddington that until they'd been frolicking on a beach together for awhile, and he went to kiss her, and he snapped, basically. Lots of issues he hadn't dealt with as regards to his wife dying with another man. Unless you count drinking and sleeping around as dealing with it.