Stometer
Save your money for something good and enjoyable
Myron Clemons
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Freeman
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
blanche-2
Lana Turner, Laraine Day, and Susan Peters star in "Keep Your Powder Dry," a 1945 film.The three women come into the WACS for different reasons: Day is carrying on the family tradition, Turner needs to live a decent life in order to get her inheritance, and Peters' husband is in the service, and she wants to help the effort. Turner and Day hate one another immediately, and a good part of the film is their struggle.I suppose this film was intended to be about girl power, but it has the typical sexist bend of the times. To be fair, I'm sure it was intended to glorify the work these women did during the war (it came out in 1945 when the war was almost over), but also it serves as a propaganda movie. Turner gives her bum friends a speech about their wasteful lives as people are fighting for them.Totally predictable. I am a fan of all three women, but this wasn't great material for any of them.
johno-21
I recently saw this on TCM and had never seen it before. Director Edward Buzzell had a career in 30's and 40's films that were mostly actress driven romantic comedies before he made the leap to television in the early 50's. He also directed a couple of Marx Brothers movies. Here he is in his element directing three talented actress. Lana Turner is Val Parks, a playgirl heiress who is being forced to join the Women's Army Corp by her family before she can get her hands on any more of the family fortune. Larraine Day is Napoleon Rand, an army brat who knows the military rules book by heart and becomes a WAC to carry on a family tradition. Susan Peters is Annie Darrison, the wife of an army officer fighting in WWII. Parks and Rand instantly develop a dislike for each other and Darrison becomes the mediator as all three are assigned as mechanics in the same unit. What makes for believable on-screen tension between the Turner and Day characters is that they couldn't stand each other in real life. Day had billing over Turner in the only other film they appeared in, 1939's Calling Dr. Kildare when Turner was an upcoming starlet. By the time filming started on this movie in August of 1944 Turner was an established star and had billing above Day. Day was icy to Turner in 1939 and Turner returned the cold shoulder in 1944. Susan Peters is one of Hollywood's tragic figures. She lost her father in an accident as a young girl and never got over it. Her acting career got off to a rocky start and was dropped by Warner Brothers but MGM saw something promising and she had earned an Academy Award nomination for Random Harvest. A miscarriage kept her off the screen just when her career was at it's brightest and she returned to the screen for this film but less than two months after filming she was shot in a hunting accident and paralyzed from the waist down. She made an attempt in limited roles to keep acting on screen, stage and television but depression led to her divorcing her husband and becoming recluse and anorexia nervosa led to her death at age 31. The Cedric Gibbins MGM art direction team on this film features 8 time Oscar winner Edwin Willis as set director. Proliffic cinematographer Ray June is the films photographer but the soft focus closeups are so overboard they are almost laughable. Some corny, silly dialog and situations but actually it isn't too bad of a movie. A female version of a WWII buddy movie. Agnes Moorehead, Natalie Schafer and June Lockhart in supporting roles. It's worth a look and I would give it a 6.5 out of 10.
sdelmendo
It seems that the film boards made a concerted effort to boost the image of women as tough and capable leading up to and continuing through World War II. "Keep Your Powder Dry" is an effort to display three women who overcome their disparate backgrounds, their petty differences, and their civilian prejudices to achieve a greater good by contributing to the war effort. A character in the film puts it this way, "...subordinate your personal feelings for the good of the corps."This is a consistent theme in movies throughout this era. In John Ford's "Pearl Harbor" a German mocks the notion that the weak and decadent American women could take the place of men in industry to free them for service as soldiers. In "Cry Havoc" we witness the courage, trials, and sacrifices of women on Corregidor. Here in "Keep Your Powder Dry" we learn of the candidates' perseverance through the trials of boot camp, motor pool training, and OCS school (though the examples that they show are weak).It is a little difficult to suspend reality far enough to buy the notion that Lana Turner could become dedicated to life in the WACs, having arrived by way of Park Avenue, but an effort is made by the screenwriter to show her recognition of the shallow and narcissistic lifestyle that she found there. It occurs rather late in the film, however.Still, for WWII movie buffs, and fans for the movies of the forties, this one is a must see.
dexter-10
Wow! Lana Turner, Laraine Day, Susan Peters, Agnes Moorhead, and June Lockhart---all in the same movie. Does it ever get better than this? Unfortunately, how such a collection of talent can be given such a poor material to recite is puzzling. Witness the following lines: "Worked in Vaudeville with a trained duck. It got so bad I ate the act." "Rust proof,shock proof, self-winding, and will darn your socks, too." "Best soldier to ever wear a skirt." Despite lines like these, the acting is good enough to compensate. Yet, the film tends to demean the concept of the civilian army. Turner plays a model seemingly patriotic enough to gain her inheritance. Day is the army brat trying to maintain a family tradition. Peters is the intellectual always mediating the feud between the other two. Their acting saves the film. A major weakness in this film is the explicit sexism of the movie's theme. The powder is not gun powder but facial make-up. Men mechanics in World War Two movies don't get oil on their cute noses, but women mechanics do. Men do not cry if they fail to qualify for Officer's Candidate School, but women can fail and just have a good cry about it! The only thing to cry about is a movie with good talent squeezed into a plot better fitted the weak training films of 1942-42 than those of 1945 when social change played a part in a number of good movies. Perhaps Hollywood was not yet ready for change, or perhaps it was hoping old formula flicks which predated World War Two would prevail. Still, the film has merit and is worth seeing, especially with it's great ending.
