21 Jun Homecoming
Homecoming, WWII Movie starring Clark Gable & Lana Turner
(1948) In this WWII film, Clark Gable plays Ulysses Johnson, an established surgeon (Gable was 47 at the time) who has joined the army medical service where he works alongside a young nurse played by Lana Turner, (27 at the time.) I bring up their ages because it really did seem to me that he was so much older than she was. The doctor is happily married to the beautiful Anne Baxter but after working together for more than two years he and his nurse fall in love.
Clark Gable had only been home from the war a short time himself when he made this movie. Just a few years before, his beloved wife Carole Lombard had died in a plane crash while on her way home from a war bond tour. So Gable really did seem worn out, but that fit his character perfectly for the army surgeon and his medical team had worked themselves to exhaustion.
Clark Gable did serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps. In the biography of Gable by Warren G. Harris, the author wrote that Gable was Adolf Hitler’s favorite actor. He offered a reward to “anyone who could capture and bring Gable to him unscathed.”
I am sure the motivation behind doing the story was to portray how difficult, really impossible, it was for the servicemen to come home and just slip right back into their former roles. I read that the movie was a popular one even though the critics reviews were mixed. The New York Times reviewer back then called it a “cheap, synthetic chunk of romance designed to exploit two gaudy stars.” I totally disagree. The glamorous Lana Turner may have been “gaudy” plenty of times but not in this movie.
One tidbit I learned is that Gable’s character’s wife, Anne Baxter, who stayed and home and wondered what on earth her husband was doing over there, was married at the time to John Hodiak, the handsome actor who played a friend of Dr. and Mrs. Johnson. I didn’t know they were married when I watched the movie, but I did sense a chemistry between Hodiak and Baxter. I wouldn’t have been one bit surprised if their characters had ended up together at the end. Baxter and Hodiak divorced in 1953, and he died of a heart attack in 1955. He was 41 years old.
I enjoyed the story and couldn’t help wondering just when did wives quit calling their husbands “Darling” in every other sentence.
Watch an original trailer at TCM.
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