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August 25 movie: Tender Comrade. Ginger Rogers stars in a weeper about four war wives sharing a rented house and trying to be brave while their husbands fight the good fight during WWII. There's a great cast but the dialogue is pretty clunky, and the movie never rises above itself to affect me the way Since You Went Away, the ultimate war-wife movie, does. Both were made during the war and obviously intended to raise the spirits of real war wives, and both are highly sentimental, but Since You Went Away manages to avoid the treacly, phony schmaltz that keeps Tender Comrade locked in mediocrity.

Unfortunately Tender Comrade is mainly known not for its own merits, but for its role in the McCarthy era 10+ years later. The director and writer were among the "Hollywood 10," and this movie in particular was used as an example of Hollywood's insidious influence on American minds. First off, because the word "comrade" is in the title (according to a title card it's from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem about the role of a wife). But mainly because the premise of four women living together and pooling their resources smacked of communism. Even star Ginger Rogers testified that she had objected to anti-American sentiments in some of her dialogue.

Watching this hyper-patriotic movie today, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have seen communist propaganda lurking within it. I guess it just goes to show how people will believe anything if they've whipped themselves into enough of a frenzy. The director, Dmytryk, wrote later of Tender Comrade: "Their motto is 'share and share alike,' which sounded quite innocently democratic when we made the film, but which turned up to haunt me a few years later when I was instructed that the real motto of a democracy is 'Get what you can while you can and the devil take the hindmost.'"