Army Surgeon (1942)

Thanks for the memories!

Strong and Moving!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Army Surgeon stars Jane Wyatt in the title role. The problem is that during World War I the army would not send Jane to France where the action was and her skills needed. Narrating this in flashback is Jane during World War II and she says in order to get there she had to pretend being a nurse. Some strange ideas back in the day.Anyway Wyatt gets two men most interested in her. Medical colleague James Ellison and carefree aviator Kent Taylor. The accent here is mostly on the romantic hijinks until all three are trapped in a cave-in of the hospital trench when the Germans advance. The film isn't exactly an epic, but it wears a lot better than many B film flagwavers made during the period. There's a nice performance by James Burke as a doughboy from, where else Brooklyn as per his character name as the comic relief.It gets pretty harrowing inside that trench. If you'll remember in The Fighting 69th many in that cast were also trapped when a trench caved in, a dramatic high point in that better known film from Warner Brothers.I think you'll like this one and as for who winds up with Wyatt you watch the film for that.

"Army Surgeon" is a B movie about - well, army surgeons, and stars Jane Wyatt, James Ellison, and Kent Taylor. Kent Taylor was Boston Blackie on television.The film starts on a ship during World War II, when Wyatt, as Elizabeth Ainsley, flashes back to her work in World War I. At that time, two men were interested in her, James Mason, a surgeon and Phil Harvey, an injured soldier. Mason and Harvey, naturally, don't like one another.At one point, all three are trapped by bomb debris with no air, in a room of injured soldiers who were too ill to move out. The two men work on digging out while Elizabeth sits with the soldiers and tries to keep them calm and comfortable. I thought that whole section was very good. As another reviewer here mentioned, the aging process between WW I and II was strange to say the least. Wyatt received a white streak in her hair and that's it. James Ellison was all white - hair, eyebrows, you name it. He looked like Father Time. It had been, what, 25 years? It looked like 50 years had passed. Quite funny but nothing we haven't seen before, if one remembers Marie Curie. Dead in her casket at 92, Greer Garson looked 40 years younger than Curie at 67.It's not too hard to figure out which one Wyatt chooses. It's a short movie. Television would beckon both Wyatt and Taylor, where they both did well. Ellison ultimately went into real estate. I wouldn't have stayed in movies either.

This is a fairly routine run of the mill war film which features the work of army surgeons in the first world war.It starts with a scene on a ship in a convoy in World War 2 and then goes back to flashback.What is so strange is that Jane Wyatt appears not to have aged in the 25 years since her World War 1 experiences,other than her hairdo has altered.However James Ellison has gone grey.Hollywood always seemed to have strange ideas as to how actors should age in a film.The story also features Jane Wyatt as the love interest fought over by a Surgeon and by an injured flier.Guess which one she chases!All i can say in conclusion is that it passes an hour without too much trouble.However don't make a special effort to see it.