THEY WERE EXPENDABLE (1945) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Ford
Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed,
Ward Bond, Cameron Mitchell, Marshall Thompson
Wayne and Montgomery play Navy officers trying to convince the brass of the tactical usefulness of PT boats. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, they swing into action, taking on the Japanese in the Philippines. An action-filled World War Two movie, shot while the war was still going on, but released a few months after the Japanese surrender. It's unmistakably a John Ford picture, from the casting of Wayne and Ward Bond to the chorus of sailors who serenade the officers (and nurse Donna Reed) at supper. For all the two-fisted heroism, it ends in a moment of defeat. The Japanese take over the islands, MacArthur withdraws (in Robert Montgomery's PT boat), and most of the film's surviving characters, the men who get left behind, are doomed.
