A Guy Named Joe is a popcorn movie entertainment in the most classic sense. We are suckered by the maven charm of the inherently self-assured never-miss talent of Irene Dunne, the cocksure wiseguy swagger of Spencer Tracy, the brazen spectacle of the airborne war effort, a creative high-concept plot device and just the romanticism of the whole thing. Victor Fleming---hot off the helm of the two most celebrated and remembered films in American history, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, which he directed both in the same year---was proved a highly capable director to say the least, particularly within the vein of such idealistic Americana as A Guy Named Joe. He was like Mervyn LeRoy, who made greatly satisfying escapist pictures like Random Harvest, but Fleming was notorious for his uber-masculine edge, which comes to life here much more than in either of his 1939 epics. It is this treatment of his surrounding talents that is designed to excite the 1943 viewer.
This drippy film uses premonitions, the afterlife and spiritual counseling to drive the story, and we tend to have some premonitions of our own in terms of cogitating the next step ahead after awhile. Legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, though his script feels rushed to conclude, sketches characterizations that the actors bring to formidable life, and not just the two fiery leads but peripheral characters whose functions in the narrative formula are self-evident, like Ward Bond and Van Johnson. It is a lavishly verbose script as well, with positive and negative results. It is, nevertheless, a melodrama, but likewise, it is not entirely such a clearly constructed world of connotations: There is no unambiguous villain posing a threat, save the unseen dogfight opponents, but a humbling test for a wealthy heroic ego. The hero does not escape, nor does he rescue the heroine. He learns to accept the hand he's dealt and the heroine is a whole other character of her own with a quest of her own.
A Guy Named Joe is still a pathos-filled tale that appeals to the heightened emotions of the audience, but done with a great deal of industry talent, and an implacable, abstract sense of wonder and novelty as a classic American studio picture. It makes me think of a strip of celluloid whirring from one reel to another between my fingertips.
This drippy film uses premonitions, the afterlife and spiritual counseling to drive the story, and we tend to have some premonitions of our own in terms of cogitating the next step ahead after awhile. Legendary screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, though his script feels rushed to conclude, sketches characterizations that the actors bring to formidable life, and not just the two fiery leads but peripheral characters whose functions in the narrative formula are self-evident, like Ward Bond and Van Johnson. It is a lavishly verbose script as well, with positive and negative results. It is, nevertheless, a melodrama, but likewise, it is not entirely such a clearly constructed world of connotations: There is no unambiguous villain posing a threat, save the unseen dogfight opponents, but a humbling test for a wealthy heroic ego. The hero does not escape, nor does he rescue the heroine. He learns to accept the hand he's dealt and the heroine is a whole other character of her own with a quest of her own.
A Guy Named Joe is still a pathos-filled tale that appeals to the heightened emotions of the audience, but done with a great deal of industry talent, and an implacable, abstract sense of wonder and novelty as a classic American studio picture. It makes me think of a strip of celluloid whirring from one reel to another between my fingertips.