The Navy Way

Robert Armstrong as a Navy CPO sees to the training of such various navy recruits as Robert Lowery, William Henry, Larry Nunn, Roscoe Karns, and Tom Keene in The Navy Way. This was a Pine-Thomas production from Paramount and was shot at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station.

Trying to mold an Espirit De Corps among this lot isn't an easy job for Armstrong. His biggest problem is Robert Lowery who before he got drafted was a promising middleweight boxer from the wrong side of the tracks. The biggest thing holding him from going over the hill is Pharmacist's Mate Jean Parker. But Henry who is a rich kid who enlisted is also interested in her.

As in Casablanca they all see that the problems of three people don't amount too much with the country at war. As for Lowery you can sympathize a bit with him because he's reaching his peak as a fighter. A whole lot of athletes in all sports missed their peak years during World War II.

Certainly The Navy Way is rather dated as a film, but it's still good entertainment. As for the Great Lakes Naval Training Station that's still there and still molding recruits The Navy Way.

This is a flag-waving programmer about the lives of boots at the Great Lakes Training Facilities during World War II. It manages to cover all the bases without doing much wrong. This Pine-Thomas feature -- they were known as "Dollar Bills" because of their ability to squeeze out a decent flick on a tight budget -- manages to have a few interesting bits despite a lack of top-notch talent.

The central story, about turning around an unwilling draftee Robert Lowery, who is more interested in winning a boxing championship than the War, and his romance with gorgeous WAVE Jean Parker is a bit subpar, but a fine supporting cast including a humorous ex-shoe clerk Roscoe Karns, cowboy Tom Keene whose son has already died in the war and and Robert Armstrong as their instructor manages to keep things humming along.

During the war years, the prolific Pine-Thomas producing team made several low-budget war-themed b&w programmers on an independent basis that were then released through Paramount. The team managed to squeeze a lot of production value into these films by including lots of location shots taken at actual military bases and training facilities. The usual pattern, as seen in a film like AERIAL GUNNER (1943), for instance, was to send a second unit to the location (the Harlingen Aerial Gunnery School in Texas), and then film the Hollywood cast (led by Richard Arlen and Chester Morris) on cramped studio sets and in front of rear-screen projected scenes of the locations. A handy way to save money, but not the most convincing way to film training and combat scenes.

With THE NAVY WAY (1944), Pine and Thomas took a different tack. It was the first of their productions to be filmed entirely on location, in this case at the U.S. Naval Training Station at Great Lakes, Illinois, with the entire cast of actors, led by Robert Lowery and Jean Parker, all on location as well. This has a significant influence on the way the film looks, feels and plays out. There's less of a hokey plot—usually the old chestnut about two guys making a play for the same girl and pulling tricks on each other to ace the other one out (see AERIAL GUNNER)—and more of an attempt to capture slice-of-life vignettes of various naval recruits in a particular unit trying to excel and get out into the war. The sore spot in the unit is Italian-American boxing champ Johnny Zamano, who resents being drafted and tries to use his connections to get out of service. When that fails, he only gradually comes around, with the help of his new buddies, and begins to live up to his obligations. There's much more of a propaganda feel to the proceedings than we saw in AERIAL GUNNER, SUBMARINE ALERT and MINESWEEPER, to name three others in this group of films that I've seen. This makes sense, given the needs of the war and the way the entire naval facility was made available for filming. The spirit of the base evidently infused the cast and filmmakers with a different kind of energy than they would have had back in Hollywood.

There is a love triangle in the film, but it asserts itself late in the story and happens quite unexpectedly—kind of like the way such things happen in real life. Johnny's plausibly petulant reaction to this development leads to an act of reckless behavior that jeopardizes his unit's near-perfect record and his own navy career. The resolution is quite moving. The characters all behave like real people and not Hollywood stereotypes and we get pulled into the movie's emotional core much more willingly because of that.

Robert Lowery, usually a straight arrow leading man in B-movies (he played Batman in a 1949 serial), struck me as an odd casting choice for a street-tough Italian-American boxer, but he's a good actor and he manages to pull it off, displaying just enough bitterness to be believable and just enough charm to eventually win over the other characters and the audience. Jean Parker, who resembles Claudette Colbert, plays the female medical officer who nurses Johnny's wounds after a bout on the base and attracts his romantic attentions. Her character is an independent adult woman with a clear sense of her own needs, desires and agenda and is not just an object bandied about between two male rivals. She makes the significant choices here, which is quite a sea change from the pattern established in the other films in the Pine-Thomas group. The cast is filled with quite a few other distinguished supporting players, most notably Robert Armstrong as the unit's training instructor; Bill Henry as a Chicago rich boy who joins up to prove himself; Tom Keene (billed as Richard Powers) as a cowboy who joins up after his son has been killed in combat; Roscoe Karns as an older recruit; and Mary Treen in a delightful performance as Karns' bubbly fiancée.

This may not be the most exciting wartime film of its era, given its emphasis on training rather than combat, but, thanks to its location filming and solid cast, it's a most unusual one and well worth a look. I found it on Mill Creek's 50-film Combat Classics DVD set.