Something of a wreck of an MGM prestige picture, with several big stars (including Gary Cooper, on loan-out from Paramount), based on a story by no less than William Faulkner. But it's ripe material for director Howard Hawks, who gets to invest this World War I drama with air battles (partly lifted from "Hell's Angels"), sea battles, and that male-camaraderie ethic he was so fond of. Here the males are Cooper, a wealthy American renting out the mansion of Joan Crawford and brother Franchot Tone (amusing seeing them play siblings, as they were married not long after this), and Robert Young, Crawford's childhood sweetheart, setting off a love triangle whose outcome is never much in doubt, not with this billing. Everybody's insufferably noble, with sacrifices galore and Faulkneresque pontificating, and the Germans are hilariously terrible shots, with these three guys, plus welcome comic relief Roscoe Karns, virtually winning the war. Crawford, overacting (as even she admitted), gets to model some very non-World War I fashions, and while everybody's British accent drifts in and out, Young does perhaps the best job, convincingly portraying a weakish young man who does rise to the occasion after tragedy strikes him. There's lots of death, and an unconvincing happy ending tacked on, and it's too long. Some exciting aerial and maritime sequences, though, and if you want an early look at Hawksian themes later and better explored in "Only Angels Have Wings" and "To Have and Have Not" and such, you'll have a good time.
Review of Today We Live
