THE FIGHTING SEABEES (1944) ** Ok, you've got a love triangle, and you've got John Wayne, Susan Hayward and William Frawley in the cast. The comedic potentialities should be obvious. Unfortunately they were out for comedy, and so Dennis O'Keefe is the third side, rather than Frawley, and the only comedy provided is by naming secondary characters things like Whanger Spreckles. It was a historic film in the sense of depicting the birth of the Seabees (kind of a naval engineering corps), and this was amplified by the fact that they had something of a war going on with some Japanese behaving very badly. So Mr. Wayne finds rugged know-it-all individualism a poor second to being a team player, and the Japanese are grinning evilly as they gun down perfectly nice white people. So it's a propaganda piece with very embarrassing aspects mingling amongst authentic historical value. So what do you do if you're head captain Seabee? Make the recruits watch it, I guess, try and laugh off the negative stereotypes, and try to feel guilty for laughing. Our propaganda flicks may not have had anything artistically on Leni Riefenstahl, but we sure as hell could always point out what's wrong with (and funny about) our enemies!
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