by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature,” which Charles and I screened in the
wee hours from 11:10 p.m. to midnight, was She Goes to War, a recent archive.org download which from the title I
was expecting to be a comedy. Surprise! It was an ultra-serious movie about
World War I with an odd production history; it was made by a company called
“Inspiration Films” in 1929, at the tail end of the silent era, and it got
caught up in the transition to the extent that two songs and some bits of
“wild” (non-synchronized) dialogue were included. The “War” to which the titular
heroine goes was the Great War — which was what World War I was usually called
before there was a World War II — and apparently it was originally a
full-length 87-minute feature released in 1929 with a few sound sequences but
most of the plot carried by intertitles in the standard silent-film manner.
Then someone else got hold of the negative and re-edited it 10 years later,
adding a sententious printed foreword by Mitchell Leichter explaining that the
story of America’s involvement in the Great War was topical again now that the
European powers were about to fight another war and it would be a matter for
the American people to decide whether we would get involved in it. The original
producers were Victor and Edward Halperin, makers of White Zombie, and director Henry King, who would continue to make
films into the 1960’s and already had some major-studio blockbusters on his
résumé: Tol’able David (1921), The
White Sister (1923), the silent Stella
Dallas (1925) and The Winning of
Barbara Worth (also 1925). (Later King
would direct some even bigger and better movies, The Song of
Bernadette and The Gunfighter in particular.) The original story was by Rupert
Hughes (Howard Hughes’ uncle) and it was adapted into a full screenplay by Fred
de Gresac (co-writer of Rudolph Valentino’s last film, Son of the
Sheik) and Howard Estabrook. According to
the imdb.com page on She Goes to War,
the full-length version was about a woman, Joan Morant (played by Eleanor
Boardman, director King Vidor’s second wife — they divorced either in 1933 or
1934, depending on whether you believe his or her imdb.com page), who disguises
herself as a man to enlist in the U.S. Expeditionary Force in World War I and
thereby see war up close and personal. There are other women floating around in
the action, including Margaret Seddon as the mother of Tom Pike (male lead John
Holland), who gets a genuinely moving scene when she turns up as he’s been
seriously wounded and more or less nurses him back to health; and a singing
camp-follower played by Alma Rubens who does two songs by Harry Akst, including
a piece called “There Is a Happy Land” which she sings to wounded
servicemembers in a desperate attempt to cheer them up. (David Bowie would
record a different song called “There Is a Happy Land” on his first album, but
his was a James M. Barrie-esque ode to lost childhood.)
What makes this a
problematical film now is that the only version that survives is the 1939
re-edit, and the people who did the re-edit apparently decided that intertitles
were so hopelessly obsolete that they would delete all the scenes containing them — which rendered the
plot, such as it was, almost totally incomprehensible and turned the film into
basically an anti-war documentary with the credited actors standing in front of
process screens showing either actual World War I combat footage or scenes of
the war from previous films. This movie probably has more process-screen footage than any ever made that wasn’t an out-and-out “effects film,” and the film as it
stands is little more than one patch of grim war footage after another — I
nodded off through much of it but Charles didn’t and he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either, and when
a full list of the actors in the movie came up after the end credit he said, “I
defy anyone to match any of those
names with anyone we saw in the movie!” The original She Goes to War was probably a genuinely powerful film, even though
done in by the technical crudity of a lot of films in that awkward three-year transition period (1927 to 1930)
from all-silent to all-talking movies, but what’s left is just a misbegotten
hash of dire-looking war footage in which the stars, such as they are, tend to
get lost amongst all the process screens. The prologue boasted that what you
were about to see was more powerful than All Quiet on the Western
Front (the 1930 Universal film, made a year
later than the original cut of She
Goes to War) and yet it wasn’t intended as
propaganda (though it sure looked
like an anti-war propaganda film to me; Leichter’s added prologue may have said
it was up to the American people whether or not to get into World War II, but
it was pretty clear from the context in which he presented the film and the way
he — or whoever — re-edited it that the conclusion he wanted the American people to draw was a principled,
pacificist isolationism) — yet well before All Quiet there were plenty of other morally ambiguous and
complex U.S. films about the Great War, including Rex Ingram’s The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921),
King Vidor’s (and George Hill’s) The Big Parade (1925) and John Ford’s Four Sons (1928), all of which were far better and more moving drama than the mash-up of the
1939 She Goes to War and probably
better than the original 1929 cut as well.
