A fellowship of Flappers decide that Paris is the happening place to meet their sweethearts, then suffer a fiery baptism of blood, death and blinding shrapnel. Edgar Selwyn directs the first act like a sexy lightweight comedy of well-groomed ingenues seeking romance, then transitions the story into a propaganda film concerning the need and sacrifice of wartime nurses, before then descending into the Hell of war with crushed hopes (and skulls), the death-rattle of dying men and the brutal mental breakdown of one of our titular heroines. This structure must have caught contemporary audiences off-guard like a sucker punch!
The plot is straightforward concerning the young women and their violent awakening towards adulthood in wartime: imagine Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H set during the Great War but from a feminine perspective. We even get a “Hawkeye” Pierce character in Robert Montgomery’s smooth talking, conniving yet sympathetic Lt. O’Brien. Though the film is an ensemble piece with multiple characters and interactions, it soon focuses almost exclusively upon two young nurses, Babs (June Walker) and Joy (Anita Page). Both actresses are excellent, but the entire cast is solid, especially the droll mockery of the always adorable ZaSu Pitts and the voluptuous bawdy humor of my favorite, Marie Prevost. The men are but supporting characters to the women and it’s refreshing to see a war film from an entirely different perspective.
Some highlights: the casually flirtatious interaction between Lt. O’Brien and Babs is totally believable, as he looks for a one-night stand and she hopes for a lifetime commitment! Joy falls for Robbie (Robert Ames) a wounded American soldier who recovers and is sent back to the front (so to speak), as they share each other’s company while on leave. Unfortunately, Joy becomes calamity when she learns that he's married which begins her desperate descent into a mental breakdown. When he dies at her feet in the final act, stuttering his last breath in her ear, she calmly has an orderly remove him from the cot so another wounded soldier can take his place. Her smock is slashed with blood. When a bombardment begins, she screams like Munch’s existential masterpiece, like her very soul ruptures from anguish. It’s quite chilling. Another brutal scene involves the nurses being evacuated towards the front and artillery shells pound the road. We see a motorcycle and sidecar get disintegrated and as the nurses try to assist one of the soldiers, Kansas (Helen Jerome Eddy) runs to his aid. She is fucking blown to pieces by another artillery round! In a later bombardment scene when Joy freaks the fuck out, the hospital collapses around her. Watch closely, this isn’t some in-camera trick. It looks like some of the actors are crushed by the heavy debris and one has a close call, all probably shot in one take! It most definitely adds brutal verisimilitude but damn, way too dangerous for the actors and technicians!! The film is quite frank about sex, depicting pre-marital and extra-marital sex as mundane while simultaneously eliding soldiers with shrapnel in their eyes, or limbs and faces obliterated, or dying of sepsis.
The story arc gives Babs a somewhat happy ending, though it kills Joy in childbirth. Lt. O’Brien survives in a German POW Camp and eventually finds Babs stateside, reuniting with Babs and his buddies’ orphaned child. What’s interesting about this reunion is its uncomfortableness and awkwardness, not a traditional jump-in-your-arms copulation. This makes it both more believable…and hopeful.
Final Grade: (B)