Deborah Kerr shines as an emotionally troubled war widow who volunteers to do Red Cross work in the Pacific Theater of WW2. William Holden is the he-bull Marine colonel who claims her almost as a right of rank. Not a combat film, it’s nevertheless a polished production with a gallery of fine acting support — all somewhat hampered by so-so direction and a script that opts for ‘easy out’ solutions to sticky emotional problems. Another VistaVision winner in a sterling presentation.

The Proud and Profane
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1956 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 111 min. / Street Date November 5, 2024 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Thelma Ritter, Dewey Martin, Marion Ross, Claude Akins, William Redfield, Ross Bagdasarian, Adam Williams, Peter Hansen, Frank Gorshin, Morgan Jones, Robert Morse, Ray Stricklyn, Joe Turkel.
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Art Directors: Hal Pereira, Earl Hedrick
Costumer: Edith Head
Film Editor: Alma Macrorie
Original Music: Victor Young
Based on the novel The Magnificent Bastards by Lucy Herndon Crockett
Produced by William Perlberg
Written for the screen and Directed by George Seaton

As we try to stay on top of classic-era war films, when one comes along that we haven’t seen, we jump at it. As it turns out, this show isn’t a combat movie at all. The title is one of those sub-Hemingway stabs at profundity that sold an air of importance:  The Naked and the Dead,  The Pride and the Passion.

Paramount’s  The Proud and Profane is from the team of William Perlberg and George Seaton, who enjoyed a long run of popular hits — Miracle on 34th Street,  The Song of Bernadette. Seaton both wrote and directed many of his pictures, and his screenplays often had clever or dynamic ideas, even when the movies have problems:  36 Hours,  What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?

Seaton adapted a novel by Lucy Herndon Crockett, an old-school army dependent who was in New Caledonia and Guadalcanal in World War II, serving as an assistant and speechwriter for a Red Cross official. Thus she was well-positioned to know about the lives of relief volunteers. The key art for Proud and Profane makes it look like a sequel to the James Jones/Fred Zinnemann  From Here to Eternity. Deborah Kerr lies on the beach, with William Holden standing boldly over her. Marines are shown boarding landing craft to assault a Pacific island objective. But the movie has no combat scenes: the entire focus is on the woman’s experience.

With stars Deborah Kerr and William Holden in the leads, audience appeal is all but guaranteed. Ms. Kerr was at the top of her game; her next picture would be the beloved musical  The King and I.  Holden was riding a can’t-lose career upswing that had started with  Sunset Blvd..  Two pictures later he’d be both the top star and a big financial winner with the hit epic  The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Red Cross field worker Lee Ashley (Deborah Kerr) arrives in Noumea, New Caledonia to help the troops, but real purpose is to learn more about the combat death of her husband, who fell on Guadalcanal. When Lee balks at comforting wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, organizer Kate Connors (Thelma Ritter) knows that she has volunteered for the wrong reason. Lee staffs the Red Cross canteen, fending off the advances of eager soldiers; she makes friends with Eddie Wodcik (Dewey Martin), a Marine who is very close to the motherly Kate.

The brash and demanding Lt. Colonel Colin Black (William Holden) takes one look at Lee on the beach and moves in to seduce her. Black is rough with his men, as seen by his browbeating of a Chaplain (William Redfield of  A New Leaf) whose battlefield prayers caused some casualties. Col. Black lies about knowing Lee’s husband. He monopolizes her free time and all but orders her about. Lee complains to Kate that she’s ashamed for being swept up so easily, but she can’t help it.

There’s nothing wrong with the dramatic setup in The Proud and Profane.  A society woman goes to a war zone to confront her personal demons. It’s refreshing to see a military officer played as both attractive and a lying SOB. Holden’s Colonel Black uses an intimidating pointing stick as a prop. The dark mustache makes Holden look older and goes against his ‘dreamboat’ star image from the previous year’s  Picnic. Even Holden’s Pike Bishop in  The Wild Bunch has more charm. Paramount may have been concerned, as why else would they drop the mustache for the film’s poster?

With all those stellar writing credits to his name, it’s hard to understand how George Seaton didn’t see what’s wrong with his script for P&P. Characters explain themselves more baldly than in a radio show or soap opera. We discover nothing for ourselves, instead, scenes play as if the author’s views from the book have been converted into instant dialogue. Key topics are addressed too directly. Col. Black explains his impoverished background as if he were practicing an autobiography. Lee Ashley shows subtlety and reserve, but Colonel Black does not. A Lieutenant that Lee knows from back home (Peter Hansen of  When Worlds Collide) starts chatting her up about their country club horsey set, and Black can barely contain his fury.

We’re so accustomed to gentlemanly, sensitive officers in movies, that Proud and Profane’s depiction of Col. Black simply seizing Lee Ashley is almost refreshing. Lee accepts without comment Black’s assertion that there are only two kinds of women for Marines, ones for sex and ones back home to marry. Col. Black lets Lee presume that marriage is in the cards without telling her vital information about himself. She clearly wants to be taken, a theme that a 1956 film could carry only so far.

When the subject of Lee’s dead husband comes up, Black growls out his opinions on the subject of cowardice and bravery.  The postwar authors of best-selling battleground novels spent hundreds of pages telling us that ideas like cowardice and bravery are meaningless in real warfare. Black is mission-centered. Intuiting that Lee needs to know how her husband died, he’ll happily provide an illusion that will get her closer to his bed.

The performances are excellent. Ms. Kerr shows Lee Ashley to be anything but a typical WW2 heroine — a ‘respectable woman’ unaware that she’ll welcome becoming an object of lust. She’s the example that boors cite to argue generalties about ‘what women really want.’  But the real subject is emotional insecurity: the strong take what they want from the weak.

Proud and Profane isn’t standard romantic escapism, but we think that audiences may have felt frustrated due to compromises mandated by the Production Code office. They involve a pregnancy, a false promise of marriage, a possible suicide attempt, a violent act and the ‘convenient’ death of someone we never see. What begins as a believable wartime relationship ends with the usual evasions and Easy Outs. Lee Ashley’s character arc compels, but its completion requires her to receive two or three more speeches revealing the true story of her husband’s demise.

Colonel Black’s ‘arc’ is more of a straight line — until a big psychic rupture. Before a ‘key event’ he’s a consistent tough-guy bastard, the kind that shuns wounded soldiers that made mistakes in combat. He’s not too far removed from John Travolta’s imperious Army General in Terrence Malick’s  The Thin Red Line. After ‘The Event’ Black does a 180 — his guilt is so intense, he forgives a soldier that tries to knife him in the back.

The violence that the Colonel so regrets was an overreaction on his part, true. But he was also trying to prevent a suicide. Perhaps ‘love’ can explain Black’s reassessment of his convictions, but the words “Forgive me” don’t explain enough. A director like Henry Hathaway or Howard Hawks might suggest that Col. Black allowed his Killer Marine instincts to be dulled over a woman, and figuratively asked to get seriously wounded.

Thelma Ritter was of course a star in her own right. Her Kate Connors provides light relief, stealing army supplies for her Red Cross Canteen. She also offers predictable emotional support for Lee. Kate delivers a ‘sigh’ moment when coaching Lee about a love life she herself has missed. Several male actors may have been angling for award atttention. The capable Dewey Martin ( The Thing from Another World,  The Desperate Hours) comes through with a nicely honed performance. Adam Williams gets a plum scene as a shell-shocked Marine given the light duty of tending to a military graveyard. He delivers some key words to Lee Ashley, but again, the scene feels like a one-act play, with everything expressed through dialogue.

Lee’s graveyard revelation doesn’t work the way it should. Lee Ashley has come halfway around the world to a war zone, not to learn about her husband’s heroism, but to find out why he left her for the Marines in the first place. How can anyone ‘fix’ a relationship after a death?  One man gave into her selfish demands, and the next needs to dominate her. Does Lee decide that going forward she’ll stand by her man no matter what?

Seaton’s screenplay makes space for bit part appearances by some interesting names. Composer-actor Ross Bagdasarian has a few good lines. In his pre-  David Saville / Chipmunks years, he must have been a real go-getter. Bagdasarian wrote  a song for Proud and Profane; the first few bars can be heard here:  ‘The Ballad of Colin Black.’

Favorite Joe Turkel is a wheelchair-bound Marine in a hospital scene. We almost don’t recognize Frank Gorshin, who in his screen debut has a good exchange or two with Thelma Ritter. The great Robert Morse is said to make his screen debut here too. We missed him, as unlikely as that seems. Claude Akins and Morgan Jones also must have slipped by somehow. Of all the bits, only Ross Bagdasarian gets screen credit. He had been given screen credit in  Rear Window despite being virtually invisible as James Stewart’s songwriting neighbor.

The Proud and Profane is a big-scale production. Paramount replicated a big Navy base on location in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands: lots of construction, many vehicles and a great costumed extras. Some aspects of ‘war romance’ movies never change. Lee and the Colonel seem to have plenty of free time for canoodling. Complete privacy is just a jeep ride away, at an isolated ‘French Inn’ located on a ravishing, deserted beach.

Optical experts John P. Fulton and Irmin Roberts embellish the Navy port with mattes that slot painted ships and docks over live action shots from the Caribbean location. Even in big-format VistaVision, some of the boats at anchor in the harbor ‘wiggle’ a little, but other illusions are excellent. The vast graveyard Lee Ashley visits is no matte.  ↑  We wonder if it might be an actual cemetery for Puerto Rican war dead.

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Proud and Profane is billed as a 2022 HD Master derived from a 4K Scan. We’re getting a lot of big-format VistaVision movies of late. We still respond positively to the logo and music fanfare — VistaVision’s impact is as impressive in B&W as it is in color.

The picture is flawless from one end to the other. We like the lighting in many scenes, even if the Red Cross canteen looks too flat and bright.  ↑  Some of the rear projection work is so good, it fools the eye. The graveyard scene has some very large-scale RP work; perhaps some of the scene was re-shot back in Hollywood.

If a Kino Blu-ray is set in World War II, the audio commentators will be Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin. They place P&P in the spectrum of movies about women in wartime, such as the Paul Newman picture Until they Sail. We dropped into the track in several places, and found good discussions, and rundowns on the filmmakers’ careers.

Overall The Proud and Profane is a mixed bag … Deborah Kerr comes off with top honors, and William Holden doesn’t try to protect his image by softening the Col. Black character. But the writing leaves both characters a bit up in the air.

We also have to admit that we’re not fans of George Seaton’s camera direction. Even when his actors are on task, he seldom convinces us that he’s found a good place to put the camera, exceptions like his  Teacher’s Pet to the contrary. Seaton just covers the action, without much emphasis or style.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Proud and Profane
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good +/-
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 17, 2024
(7229prof)

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