Wake Island 08/04/20

Never heard of Wake Island?  Its fall terrified Americans at Christmas of 1941. The war’s just begun, we’re definitely not winning, and the assignment was to make a movie about a tragic defeat that might be the first of many tragic defeats for the U.S.A.. Paramount’s careful morale-builder doesn’t exaggerate or sentimentalize the brutal fall of a tiny atoll in the Pacific, and stands as an example of filmmaking reaching for hope in the face of disaster. John Farrow directs a fine group of actors who knew the film ‘had to say the right things’: Brian Donlevy, Robert Preston, Macdonald Carey, William Bendix, Albert Dekker, Walter Abel, Mikhail Rasumny, Richard Loo, Philip Van Zandt. On Blu-ray from KL Studio Classics.
08/04/20