Stand by for Action (1942)

Why so much hype?

Too much of everything

From my favorite movies..

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Robert Taylor, Brian Donlevy, Charles Laughton, and Walter Brennan "Stand by for Action" in this 1942 WW II drama.Laughton appoints Ivy League Navy man Taylor as executive officer of a World War I warhorse, The Warren, commanded by Donlevy. It's an old ship and needs a lot of repair work, but there are people who believe in it, most notably, Yeoman Henry Johnson (Brennan), who was with the ship in WWI.En route to meet the convoy led by Laughton, the ship picks up survivors from a Hawaiian hospital - twenty babies and two pregnant women.I'm pretty sure "Stand by for Action" was supposed to be a stirring propaganda drama, but once the babies come on board, it sort of becomes a comedy. Two different movies and one confused script. Some of the action was good, though.I tend to watch Robert Taylor films as an homage to my late mother, who loved him. He always reminds me of her - after all, I knew his real name when I was still in grade school. It always cracks me up that he does roles like the Harvard grad in this, or the title role in A Yank at Oxford. He was a Nebraska farm boy who loved the outdoors and horses, something he shared with his first wife, Barbara Stanwyck. But he sure looked debonair. He did make some very fine films, my favorite being Escape, one of his best performances. After the war, he played villainous roles - go figure.Charles Laughton is great as usual as a commander with a desk job dying to get back to active duty; Brian Donlevy is good as captain of The Warren, and Walter Brennan gives a sympathetic performance as Yeoman Johnson.This movie needed to stick to one thing - resuscitating this barge and putting it into battle, or taking care of babies and pregnant women.

This film starts very strong with Robert Taylor playing a Ivy League-trained Reserve Navy Officer who so far during WWII has become accustomed to serving duty in an assignment on the fringe of the war as an Admiral's aide where he enjoys plenty of hobnobbing with females at Washington DC social events. His commitment is put to the test when his boss assigns him as Executive Officer of a rusty WWI Tin Can that he must now man and ready for deployment.Brian Donlevy is solid as always as the Tin Can's skipper and given our current Middle East military call-ups, the film points to some interesting issues regarding the Reservist Taylor serving on active duty in wartime. A film worth watching, but ultimately, however, it saps itself too deep in corny WWII patriotic sentimentality, thereby missing an opportunity to become one of the better war films.

The story is fiction but the war was very real when this movie was made. While not intended to be a comedy, it has it's moments of humor. I heard it said this was to be a British movie but was switched to Hollywood because Britian was in deep straits and under attack at the time. Whatever the reason, it plays pretty well except for the old US 4 piper destroyer sinking a modern Japanese battleship (not a Japanese destroyer) . Not very likely, but that's Hollywood for you. However, the acting by Charles Laughton is classic. He does indeed steal every scene he's in and that takes some doing when one of the other actors is Walter Brennan. Laughton's John Paul Jones speech to the ship's company is superb and stirring even 60 years later.-BullMoose

The movie is divided into three parts, like Gaul. Part I: Character. Charles Laughton as the crusty old admiral (is there any other kind?) longs to get back to sea and join the war in 1943. Laughton has an efficient but cocky and somewhat spoiled aide in Robert Taylor -- a Harvard man. Brian Donleavy is a former enlisted man who has worked his way up to Lieutenant Commander and Laughton makes him skipper of a refurbished old destroyer, the USS Warren left over from WWI. Figuring that his aide needs a bit of seasoning to make a good officer, Laughton assigns him to the Warren as Executive Officer. Taylor makes a decent exec but misses no opportunity to twit the captain.Part II: "Comedy." There is no romantic interest for Taylor, so the film introduces sentiment and comedy by having the Warren pick up a lifeboat filled with two women and a dozen babies. The crew goes nuts over the presence of the women and babies, especially when it turns out that BOTH of the women are pregnant and must give birth in sequence.Part III: Action. Because of Taylor's having made a mistake in judgment, the Warren shows up an hour late before taking its position as part of the destroyer screen for a convoy. A Japanese battleship shows up and wounds the convoy's flagship. Donleavy decides on a courageous and almost certainly suicidal manouever to save the convoy, but he is knocked unconscious before he finishes. Taylor takes over command, zips the Warren back and forth through its own smoke screen, and blows the battleship (a "pagoda-masted buzzard") out of the water.I wish I could say I liked it because I'm ordinarily attracted to these inexpensive and propagandistic movies made during the war, some of them well executed within their limitations. This isn't one of them. It's easy going enough, no more intense than a war-time comic book, but it's too long to hold one's interest.The comedy episode is really really dated. Maybe we've seen too many movies in which women (with or without kids) are reluctantly taken aboard a warship -- "Operation Pacific", "Operation Petticoat," "Hell or High Water," and the couldn't-be-better-titled "The Baby and the Battleship." Whatever the reason, my heart sank when the lifeboat full of babies showed up because I knew what was coming. What I didn't know is that it would take so agonizingly long to get through it. The officers' eyes pop. The men assigned to care for the babies are plug uglies. And then the deliveries of the new babies. Eyes pop again. "She can't have a baby -- that's against regulations!" The pharmacist's mate is scared to death. Everybody is scared to death. The crew paces back and forth, smoking nervously, while the baby is delivered. ("A boy?") Then the second lady comes to term and we go through the whole routine once more. It's like being on the Long Island Expressway on a Sunday night, with the cars rolling along at ten or sometimes five miles an hour, sometimes stopping completely.I won't go on. It's not a hateful movie. I just wish it had been better so that I could recommend watching it but my muse is screaming in my ear.