Keep Your Powder Dry - Movie Poster - 11 x 17 Review

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(More customer reviews)A shame that KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY is available on Amazon only in poster form, but this magnificent posed publicity shot will illustrate, should further reasoning be needed, why it is one of the greatest American films of the 1940s. There was CITIZEN KANE, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, NOTORIOUS, and a few more, and then there was KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY, a social experiment in film engineering that had them panting in the aisles. The day it premiered the Women's Army Corps experienced a thunderous 3000 per cent jump in enlistment and Fort Oglethorpe, in Georgia (where much of the last half of the film takes place) was overrun by sightseers and looky-loos, all of them wanting to touch the actual locations of a film that had meant so much to them. Without spoiling the emotional hooks of KYPD, I'll just say that most of the film is a duel between two powerful screen personalities. In the same way that 90s audiences were mesmerized by the collision of Al Pacino and Robert de Niro in Michael Mann's HEAT, so were wartime audiences when they experienced the never to be repeated teaming of Laraine Day and Lana Turner, each apparently outdoing the other one in sheer star charisma and complexity of hair. Turner plays Valerie Parks, a Paris Hilton type, a spoiled heiress who doesn't wear much, but runs out of money playing around with a vapid crew of epicenes shotgunned by elegant, yet morally tawdry Natalie Schaefer, in what amounts to a huge part for the tragically underused character actress. You haven't really experienced decadence until you view it from the swanky room service parlours of Valerie's posse, which includes the terminally corrupt pretty boy socialite Junior Vanderheusen (Jess Barker, who had his molars removed to give his weedy little face the proper dose of twitness and vacuity. The whole bunch is rotten to the core, but Lana finds deep within herself a hidden reserve of patriotic duty, or is it merely the simple pleasure of finding herself actually able to do something correctly? Odd note for Lana fans, her stern attorney here, the man she cowers from, is called Avery Lorrison, and of course 7 years later she would find herself playing her greatest part, screen star Georgia Lorrison, in Vincente Minnelli's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1952). Wonder if she even remembered, or maybe she thought that "Lorrison" is actually a common name, who knows with Lana? In any case she is indomitable here, fierce, kittenish, panicky, sexy, it is just one of the many parts for which she should have won an Oscar but her private life put paid to that.
And what an odd movie for MGM, for there is absolutely no romance of any kind in it! You'll be waiting and waiting for Laraine Day and Lana Turner to start quarrelling over a man, but none shows up. It might have started a new trend in the movies, though it didn't--films without the same tired old love angle. Instead it's basically about how Laraine and Lana find themselves through the challenge of basic training and OTC. Lana finds she's better than she thought she was, Laraine suffers a severe setback to her self-esteem.
Meanwhile the third party in the triangle, Susan Peters, performs in what would tragically be her very last role. Peters seems shoehorned into the movie, playing the only woman in the whole world who could befriend the two deadly rivals Day and Turner. She's a married woman who joins the WAC not only because it's the right thing to do, but because she can earn a few pennies and therefore begin a family sooner. Poor thing! What can a viewer say about Susan Peters? Her odd little face and her grave demeanor give her an ageless childishness. All the things James Agee said about Margaret O'Brien in MEET ME IN ST LOUIS are actually true of Susan Peters--she has the kind of face that doesn't lie, that meets a painful world with an arresting immediacy. She could have played the tormented donkey in Bresson's AU HASARD BALTHASAR. Instead she died so young, victim of a terrible disease, The camera always catches Susan Peters right around the eyes, great pools of suffering and understanding. When she cuddles in her husband's arms and the radio swells with their signature tune, "I'll See You in My Dreams," all of the dreams ever dreamed by mankind since the age of the dinosaurs flit through the air in Platonic display. She has everything, but because it's her, you just know that everything will be stripped from her by the end of the movie. From what unimaginable reserve does she find the bravery to face a future so weighted with dark certainty? Just plucky I guess.

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