The Fighting Seabees **** (1944, John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Dennis O’Keefe) – Classic Movie Review 7173

In the last year of his five-year contract with Republic Pictures signed just before the success of 1939’s Stagecoach, John Wayne stars as Wedge Donovan in The Fighting Seabees, one of the studio’s typical B-movie wartime action movies.

Despite some plotting and dialogue problems and being so evidently set bound, director Edward Ludwig’s lively 1944 black and white World War Two drama about America’s Seabee construction-worker battalion tackling the Japanese in the South Pacific shows true grit and often raises the temperature both as wartime flagwaver and adventure and romance. Perhaps there is too much of the latter for action fans, though all is well with capable, tough Susan Hayward as the woman who so often diverts Wayne and his rival in love Dennis O’Keefe from their duty.

The good cast and director Ludwig keep this influential war movie going nimbly and the action is stirred along with rousing music that gained an Oscar nomination for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for Walter Scharf and Roy Webb.

Also in the cast are William Frawley, Duncan Renaldo, Addison Richards, Leonid Kinskey, Grant Withers, Ben Weldon, William Forrest and Paul Fix.

The Fighting Seabees is notable as the first movie to get Wayne into World War Two, a regular niche for him for the rest of his career. In real life Wayne received a 3-A deferment from the draft for family dependency since he was a father of four, and did not serve in World War Two. John Ford became a commander in the US Navy and frequently told Wayne ‘to get into it’, saying Wayne was growing rich as other men died.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7173

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