Tonight's Movie: Tender Comrade (1943)

We've been doing a lot of movie watching around here lately! Having seen movies from 1932, 1952, and 1962 within the last week, perhaps we should have tried for 1942 this evening -- we came close, though, with a 1943 film, TENDER COMRADE, starring Ginger Rogers.

The film was about several women working at Douglas Aircraft during WWII who share a house together while their husbands are off fighting. It was clunkily scripted and pretty sappy -- you could see the ending coming from five minutes into the picture -- but Ginger is always great. She made us cry at the end. :)

One interesting thing we noticed was that some of the dialogue about the war seemed relevant to our country's situation today, including a discussion of whether it was "worth it" for the men to be fighting and whether their serving in faraway countries would actually help our country here at home.

TENDER COMRADE is not of the quality of another of Ginger's WWII homefront films, I'LL BE SEEING YOU (1944), which was also quite serious but unexpectedly wonderful -- but as a Ginger fan, I'm glad to have seen one more of her movies.

The film might be hard to find affordably on video but, like some of the other films we've recently enjoyed, it's part of the Turner Classic Movies library. I've had quite a bunch of taped movies piled up and am glad to have had the chance to catch up with some of them recently!

A side note: some sources list TENDER COMRADE as a 1944 movie; although it went into general release that year, it premiered in December 1943.

May 2018 Update: This film will be released on DVD by the Warner Archive in June 2018.

February 2019 Update: My review of the Warner Archive DVD may be found here.