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Blu ray review: The Proud and the Profane (1956)


George Seaton takes an auteurist approach to this wartime romantic drama, newly released on bluray by Kino Lorber, acting as writer, director and co-producer. 

 

Deborah Kerr plays a widow who joins the military Red Cross after her husband is killed in action.  William Holden plays the officer who was with her husband when he perished.  Providing her with the information she seeks, he is an arrogant man who the woman falls for, despite his personality and the guilt she feels about the situation.  She learns more about her husband than she realized, and ends up pregnant, later discovering that the officer is married. 

 

George Seaton was known for lighter films like Apartment for Peggy and Chicken Every Sunday, as well as the Christmas perennial Miracle of 34th Street.  However, he achieved some real success with the drama The Country Girl for which Grace Kelly won an Oscar, and was branching out as both a screenwriter and director.  This film is based on the best-selling novel The Magnificent Bastards by Lucy Herndon Crockett, the title changed for cinema’s limitations at the time


The supporting cast is fine, with Thelma Ritter all but stealing the film from its leads as the head of the Red Cross, and does so smoothly and effortlessly. Dewey Martin is a solider who is struck by the widow’s resemblance to his sister, who died in a fire as a child.  William Refield is a Chaplain who has been demoted due to a bad decision that cost men lives, and he remains haunted by that situation.

 

The Proud and the Profane is a very powerful film, immediately absorbing and compelling throughout.  Kino Lorber’s bluray is a 4K scan from a 2022 master by Paramount Pictures.  It includes audio commentary by film historian Steven Mitchell, and the author of Combat Films: American Realism, Steven Jay Rubin.

 

The bluray can be purchased at this link:  PROUD/PROFANE

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James L. Neibaur
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