Actually, it all still sounds like a good idea. Group of women working in an armament factory while their men are overseas at war. Check. Women live together to split the rent, share camaraderie. Check. Subplots nearly write themselves: fidelity, infidelity, rationing, loneliness, etc. Have it done by a talented cast, a good director, a respected writer. What could go wrong?
Pretty much everything in my view. An overdose of sentimentality is the main culprit, beginning with the lachrymose musical score that insists on telegraphing to the audience the emotions it's to feel despite the fact that those emotions are painfully obvious in the first place. Blatantly symbolic shots of our main couple (Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan) introduce flashbacks to cringe-worthy effect. Fantastic mountains are made out of molehills (a simple kindness by a butcher to five women, i.e., giving them an extra pound of bacon, is treated as if Benedict Arnold had just wandered onto the premises); (spoiler alert) no less than a 7 minute speech is given poor Ginger Rogers to lament the death of her husband. That she underplayed it with all her might made this ending at least tolerable, but still...
The cast is a strong one. Robert Ryan had little opportunity to play romantic leads, or good guys in general, and does so quite well in TENDER COMRADE. For whatever reasons, Ginger Rogers had better performances, indeed, almost inevitably gave better performances than she did here. She resorted to her usual habit of changing her voice to portray her character at a younger age, but this time it simply made the character seem shrill and emotionally immature, and these flashbacks must have taken place only 2 or 3 years earlier than the present so it didn't make much sense to change her voice like that. The rest of the cast, Kim Hunter, Ruth Hussey, Patricia Collinge, Mady Christians, are uniformly effective. The writing would seem to be the movie's primary problem. I agree with those who consider Dalton Trumbo's high reputation to be questionable. In Hollywood it's hard to say for sure since virtually all scripts are the products of committees (either multiple writers working together or serial drafts from different writers who often never meet), but generally I'd say of all of Trumbo's better contributions (KITTY FOYLE, ROMAN HOLIDAY, SPARTACUS, EXODUS) that the films' excellencies are not dominated by their scripts.
TENDER COMRADE is mostly remembered for political reasons. Mostly the Production Code of that era made any overt Communist propaganda impossible no matter how much it may have been desired by some (though the wartime alliance between the Soviets and Americans did lead to a couple of out-and-out propaganda flicks. THE NORTH STAR comes to mind). Trumbo, of course, joined the Communist Party around the time he wrote TENDER COMRADE, and by his own words he might as well have been a member the previous 10 years. Any pro-Communist sentiments in TC are so tenuous as to be indistinguishable for any but those really looking for them (someone like Ginger Rogers' mother rather than Ginger herself, I should guess). We might recall that Trumbo's noted pacifist novel 'JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN' was written while the Hitler/Stalin pact was in effect and Trumbo's efforts were in line with the Party's, i.e., keep the U.S. out of the war. As soon as Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Trumbo miraculously transformed into a bloodthirsty interventionist, the Trumbo we see in TENDER COMRADE, to the extent that he informed on possible Isolationists to the FBI, bragging about his efforts in this regard in a letter he wrote to the FBI, reprinted in ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE. While Communism murdered approx. 100 million people (this is not counting war dead. See THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM for details), the difficulty that Trumbo and his ilk (exceptionally talented in covering up irrelevant details such as the intentional mass starvation of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet government) had in getting writing jobs in Hollywood for a decade or so is, of course, the major barbarity of the last century.
Oh, I should add that the short scene early in the film between Ginger Rogers and Jane Darwell was exceptionally touching, easily the best thing in TENDER COMRADE.
Pretty much everything in my view. An overdose of sentimentality is the main culprit, beginning with the lachrymose musical score that insists on telegraphing to the audience the emotions it's to feel despite the fact that those emotions are painfully obvious in the first place. Blatantly symbolic shots of our main couple (Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan) introduce flashbacks to cringe-worthy effect. Fantastic mountains are made out of molehills (a simple kindness by a butcher to five women, i.e., giving them an extra pound of bacon, is treated as if Benedict Arnold had just wandered onto the premises); (spoiler alert) no less than a 7 minute speech is given poor Ginger Rogers to lament the death of her husband. That she underplayed it with all her might made this ending at least tolerable, but still...
The cast is a strong one. Robert Ryan had little opportunity to play romantic leads, or good guys in general, and does so quite well in TENDER COMRADE. For whatever reasons, Ginger Rogers had better performances, indeed, almost inevitably gave better performances than she did here. She resorted to her usual habit of changing her voice to portray her character at a younger age, but this time it simply made the character seem shrill and emotionally immature, and these flashbacks must have taken place only 2 or 3 years earlier than the present so it didn't make much sense to change her voice like that. The rest of the cast, Kim Hunter, Ruth Hussey, Patricia Collinge, Mady Christians, are uniformly effective. The writing would seem to be the movie's primary problem. I agree with those who consider Dalton Trumbo's high reputation to be questionable. In Hollywood it's hard to say for sure since virtually all scripts are the products of committees (either multiple writers working together or serial drafts from different writers who often never meet), but generally I'd say of all of Trumbo's better contributions (KITTY FOYLE, ROMAN HOLIDAY, SPARTACUS, EXODUS) that the films' excellencies are not dominated by their scripts.
TENDER COMRADE is mostly remembered for political reasons. Mostly the Production Code of that era made any overt Communist propaganda impossible no matter how much it may have been desired by some (though the wartime alliance between the Soviets and Americans did lead to a couple of out-and-out propaganda flicks. THE NORTH STAR comes to mind). Trumbo, of course, joined the Communist Party around the time he wrote TENDER COMRADE, and by his own words he might as well have been a member the previous 10 years. Any pro-Communist sentiments in TC are so tenuous as to be indistinguishable for any but those really looking for them (someone like Ginger Rogers' mother rather than Ginger herself, I should guess). We might recall that Trumbo's noted pacifist novel 'JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN' was written while the Hitler/Stalin pact was in effect and Trumbo's efforts were in line with the Party's, i.e., keep the U.S. out of the war. As soon as Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Trumbo miraculously transformed into a bloodthirsty interventionist, the Trumbo we see in TENDER COMRADE, to the extent that he informed on possible Isolationists to the FBI, bragging about his efforts in this regard in a letter he wrote to the FBI, reprinted in ADDITIONAL DIALOGUE. While Communism murdered approx. 100 million people (this is not counting war dead. See THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM for details), the difficulty that Trumbo and his ilk (exceptionally talented in covering up irrelevant details such as the intentional mass starvation of the Ukrainian people by the Soviet government) had in getting writing jobs in Hollywood for a decade or so is, of course, the major barbarity of the last century.
Oh, I should add that the short scene early in the film between Ginger Rogers and Jane Darwell was exceptionally touching, easily the best thing in TENDER COMRADE.