Last night my wife and I, watched this film, made towards the end of WWII. When I sat down to watch this, it was immediately captivating once I accepted that this was to be made in the idiom of the time. This was shot when we were at war, with news of the death or maiming of a loved one a fear that those who went to the movies wanted to get some relief from.
We first see Van Johnson, the decent every-guy who was facing an operation to remove shrapnel from his chest,close to his heart, that would obviously cut his life short, unless removed. The operation was scheduled for Tuesday (The Weekend is two days of real time.) The first scene is the surgeon dictating the letter to the military hospital, as we see the reaction of the stenographer, Lana Turner, as she learns he has only a fifty percent chance to survive, and that's only if he has a "will to live."
Lana Turner and Van Johnson were movie stars whose picture on the cover of fan magazine was a sure boost for sales. In this film, with the complex plot unfolding, they were true actors playing their part, conveying lines written by others that they embraced fully. Johnson become the decent pilot whose best friend he "kidded" into joining him on a mission, that he did not survive. A guilt that consumed the Pilot, making that necessary will to live something that was problematic.
For those who want a narrative of the story, it is on the Wikipedia article (with a note that it may be too detailed) but this is written on a political website, and I'm going to make detour using this film as a template for a conversation between two eras, that of when the film was written, that happens to be when I was just grasping the world as a toddler, and today, some three quarters of century of the progression of history.
One graphic illustration of the change of this time span is the scene out the window, a view South showing the Empire State Building 18 blocks to the South, with this skyscraper then the tallest building in the world since completion in 1933, , and still standing alone like the Washington Monument in D.C. There was no building done in the United States, and actually the world, as the depression started soon after the opening, and then the war. That was twelve years of two very different causes of economic paralysis.
So this contrived plot, from the view out the window to the interplay of the fictional characters had a ring of truth that is exceptional. We see Stenographer Lana Turner, with intelligence, ambition and beauty having to make a choice. Either she could become a private secretary to an amoral international con-man, allowing her to live a life that would wipe out the memory of her raw hell's kitchen childhood, or it was growing old as she worked in an office. While the lines were fiction, the choice for those times were genuine. And the film depicted this challenge, and her decision that was not sugar coated, but one that reflected perfectly what life as like for the vast majority of women.
The several shots of the bank of telephone operators, an exaggeration of the numbers for the 1500 room hotel, but not of the millions of women who spent their working life with conversations limited to responding to "number please." As far as racial issues, they were completely avoided, as there wasn't a single frame, including in the crowd shots of anyone who was other than than, on appearance, being of the "Caucasian" race. In the two reviews that are extant, Variety and the N.Y. Times, this is not noted, as this is the way things were. There were "race films" in this era --and then everything else. The division between male and female, black and white in the film were a starting point for drama or comedy.
Not a single person who viewed this film, absolutely absorbed in the humor and the drama sequestered in the darkness of their local theater could have imagined the world we live in now.
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