Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of The Inkspots performing I’ll Get By.
CD Review
Until We Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War II, various artists, Smithsonian Institute, 1993
Joshua Lawrence Breslin comment:
My late mother (Delores, nee LeBlanc) from the French-Canadian sections of Olde Saco up in Maine was an inveterate letter-writer and letter saver. After she passed on I went up into the attic of our old tumble-down working class house on Atlantic Avenue to start the long process of sorting out her “legacy.” What I discovered was that not only did she save her own received letters but those of her family, her brothers and sisters mostly. One written by her sister, Nina, from World War II three-cent stamped and all shook me up for days. Here it is and in it is the essence of what the CD mentioned above is all about.
********
December 13, 1942
Hi Jimmy,
I hope this letter gets to you okay and that you are in good health and good spirits. We haven’t heard much recently about Guadalcanal so we are taking that as a good sign that things have settled down and you can rest. Even my father, my straight arrow Army World War I father, says you guys are doing a hell of job mopping up the Japs out there. Sorry for the swear but, you know Dad, that’ how he speaks when he talks about stuff like that. I guess that means that you are okay and that he has gotten over the fact that you chose to go into the Marines instead of waiting, like a lot of guys, a lot of guys like Jimmy LaCroix, Delores’ beau, to be inducted into the Army. I am proud of you and hope your every waking thought (and dreams too) are of me. Well, except when you are shooting or doing Marine stuff.
Jimmy, every time I listen to the radio and hear I Don’t Want To Walk Without You I get a little teary and think of that last night we had together before you shipped out. Oh, I am not crying about what we did and why I let you go as far as you did. No that only brings me closer to you. What I am teary about is that you had to go away right away and I didn’t get a chance to tell you it was okay. That I was your girl forever now whatever happens. The same thing happens when I hear your old favorite song We’ll Meet Again. Remember when we fought half the night a couple of week s before you left about whether that song or I’ll Never Smile Again was the cat’s meow. And then I Don’t Want To Walk Without You won in the end. Funny, hah.
Say, I had been feeling a little funny lately, a little sick, not much nothing to worry about but I feel better today because I am writing you. Gee, I wish you were here and we could go somewhere and dance, and do you know what. I wouldn’t let you down. Well, that’s about it for tonight because my pen is running out of ink.
Always your girl- Nina
********
P.S. The envelope that contained this letter bore the makings- Return To Sender-Deceased stamped across the front. Jimmy Dubois had been killed under a hail of enemy fire while trying to rescue a buddy on hellhole Guadalcanal on December 10, 1942. RIP-Jimmy Dubois-JLB
Showing posts with label growing up absurd in the 1940s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growing up absurd in the 1940s. Show all posts
Friday, June 1, 2012
Monday, August 29, 2011
Out In The 1940s Crime Noir Night-Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake’s “This Gun For Hire”-A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for This Gun For Hire.
DVD Review
This Gun For Hire, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, based on a novel by Graham Greene, Paramount Pictures, 1942
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1942, This Gun For Hire, offers parts of both. The plot line maybe less so, although because it is set in World War II America and indirectly part of the fight to defeat the nefarious (in this case Japanese) enemy it has a certain intrigue factor. As for femme fatale energy, or rather quasi-femme fatale energy, although I have always considered Veronica Lake (and her classic air over her eye look) fetching here she is cross between that type and the girl next door.
As for the plot. Alan Ladd, a gun for hire to the highest bidder does his job as expected and is paid off for doing so. Unfortunately those that hired Ladd to silence an employee of a chemical company whose president was ready to sell poison gas to the highest bidder (Japan)were not on the level. They tried, might and main, to set Brother Ladd up as the fall guy. But one does not get to be, or rather one does not survive in the hired gun business, by being a chump for some nefarious scheme. Needless to say the plot is partially driven by his well-earned revenge.
However, a second plot line is brought in by Ms. Lake. America was at war and selling poison gas to the bidder, Japan, was, well, not right so she is “hired” to get the goods on the chemical operation through a weak-link, one of the company executives. Naturally in the course of these two plots unwinding the Ladd-Lake combination is brought to a boil, well, almost a boil. Through twists and turns the pair get the bad guys, although Ladd as a bad guy himself, or maybe just misunderstood, has to take a bullet for the cause because as we all know- “crime, especially murder, does not pay.” Not as good a pairing of Ladd and Lake as in The Glass Key but okay. But you can see what I mean about this one being sort of a semi-classic noir, right?
DVD Review
This Gun For Hire, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, based on a novel by Graham Greene, Paramount Pictures, 1942
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1942, This Gun For Hire, offers parts of both. The plot line maybe less so, although because it is set in World War II America and indirectly part of the fight to defeat the nefarious (in this case Japanese) enemy it has a certain intrigue factor. As for femme fatale energy, or rather quasi-femme fatale energy, although I have always considered Veronica Lake (and her classic air over her eye look) fetching here she is cross between that type and the girl next door.
As for the plot. Alan Ladd, a gun for hire to the highest bidder does his job as expected and is paid off for doing so. Unfortunately those that hired Ladd to silence an employee of a chemical company whose president was ready to sell poison gas to the highest bidder (Japan)were not on the level. They tried, might and main, to set Brother Ladd up as the fall guy. But one does not get to be, or rather one does not survive in the hired gun business, by being a chump for some nefarious scheme. Needless to say the plot is partially driven by his well-earned revenge.
However, a second plot line is brought in by Ms. Lake. America was at war and selling poison gas to the bidder, Japan, was, well, not right so she is “hired” to get the goods on the chemical operation through a weak-link, one of the company executives. Naturally in the course of these two plots unwinding the Ladd-Lake combination is brought to a boil, well, almost a boil. Through twists and turns the pair get the bad guys, although Ladd as a bad guy himself, or maybe just misunderstood, has to take a bullet for the cause because as we all know- “crime, especially murder, does not pay.” Not as good a pairing of Ladd and Lake as in The Glass Key but okay. But you can see what I mean about this one being sort of a semi-classic noir, right?
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