Panel 1: Closer-up view of Eliza. Almost all the tentacles are gone from her now, leaving just her being sucked still further into the feeding siphon. Her breasts are pushed up, compressed by the comparative narrowness of the siphon.
CAPTION – FUZZY BOX INDICTING RECOVERED SPEECH (1): …I love it zzt love it…pop…I love it…fwwwt…
Translation (1): …Как хорошо тшш как хорошо…щелк…как хорошо…фвввт…
SUBTITLE (2): Magnified and enhanced drone footage.
Translation (2): Видеозапись с робота (увеличение).
Panel 2: Final close-up view of Eliza. Only her head now protrudes from the feeding siphon.
SUBTITLE (4): Magnified and enhanced drone footage.
Translation (4): Видеозапись с робота (увеличение).
Panel 3: Eliza’s head had just been sucked into the feeding siphon. A largish bubble has erupted forth from the siphon’s end.
SFX – BUBBLE EMERGING AS ELIZA DISAPPEARS (5): Bloop!
Translation (5): Буль-буль!
SUBTITLE (6): Magnified and enhanced drone footage.
Translation (6): Видеозапись с робота (увеличение).
Panel 4: A panel shaded from light to dark top to bottom (indicating light being filtered out as the ocean gets deeper). At the very bottom of the panel we can see the creature’s feeding siphon protruding.
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MONTAGE – SWAT TEAM ARRIVES
– A caravan of police vehicles, including the SWAT van and many police cars blasts down a main street in the night, lights flashing ans sirens blaring.
Please do not reproduce this storyboard or its associated screenplay text without permission from Faustus, who may be contacted here.
SUBTITLE (2): Magnified and enhanced drone footage.
Translation (2): Видеозапись с робота (увеличение).
Panel 2: View drawn back showing Eliza in the midst of a writing mass of tentacles coming in from out of the frame. At the lower right of the frame, the creature’s siphon appears.
Panel 4: Same view. Eliza is not about half-sucked into the feeding siphon. Many of the tentacles have retreated from her body so as not to get sucked in with her.
CAPTION – FUZZY BOX INDICATING RECOVERED SPEECH (7): …feels so good going into you…zztt pop!…
Translation (7): …так хорошо войти в тебя…ззтт щелк!…
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MONTAGE – SWAT TEAM ARRIVES
– Inside the van, officers pull on body armor, load and check automatic weapons. The body armor includes helmet with shields that obscure the faces of the officers.
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I was feeling unusually patriotic last night for some reason, and so I decided to watch something a little different from the usual collection of body horror, film noir, and dark comedy that make up most of my evening cinematic diversions.
So Proudly We Hail came out 1943, about eighteen months after the events it supposedly depicts. Its female leads Claudette Colbert (1903-1996), Paulette Goddard (1910-1990), and Veronica Lake (1922-1973) were among the Hollywood’s brightest stars in 1943. The movie was produced by Paramount Pictures, one of the bigs and it shows in high production values with large sets and a huge cast. And just like the box says, the movie did get four Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actress (for Goddard), Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Screenplay.
So this movie was big deal in 1943. And it deserves to be: it was exceptional American war propaganda, quite skillfully representing its American protagonists as humane, decent, and courageous while representing their Japanese antagonists (never really seen except in shadows or as taunting radio voices) as thoroughly vile, the sort of people that would bomb and strafe a clearly-marked hospital (which they actually do in the course of the movie). It’s a tear-jerker but with bit of Hollywood uplift in the ending.
As such, it might be a bit surprising that the movie isn’t better known than it is, but I think I might know why. You see, there’s this scene right at the halfway point of the movie.
The scene
It is 1942. The American Army and its Filipino allies are getting their collective asses kicked by the Japanese down the Bataan peninsula. A group of nurses under the command of Lt. Janet ‘Davy’ Davidson are under orders to evacuate with the rest of their field hospital, together with a group of sick and wounded Filipino children under their care. Unluckily for them their group is one of the last out. A squad of Japanese soldiers infiltrates the hospital grounds and kills the two soldiers assigned to drive their truck out. The nurses and children huddle in a shack in the dark, clearly terrified. One recalls (rather loudly) what Japanese soldiers did to women in Nanjing in 1937. Colbert throws one of the dead soldiers’ grenades away from the shack as a distraction and makes for the truck, only to discover that she doesn’t have the ignition keys.
At this point Lt. Olivia D’Arcy (Lake) takes a grenade of her own. There is a brief conversation in which Lake tells Colbert “It’s one of us or all of us.”
And in spite of Colbert’s horrified protests that Lake shouldn’t do what it is obvious that she is going to do, Lake walks out, pulls the pin out of the grenade and tucks it into her brassiere.
Lake walks out with her hands raised in apparent surrender.
She is promptly surrounded by Japanese infantrymen and…
KABOOM!
The consequence of the scene
I don’t know how the scene was received in September 1943 when So Proudly We Hail was released, but it’s pretty clear that we are meant to see Lake as a heroine here. By about a year later, though, this coding would have to be forgotten when the Japanese began kamikaze attacks on Allied warships. Paul Fussell (1924-2012), one America’s most perceptive writers on war, noted something similar happening to an earlier war myth:
Widely believed in the dark days of 1942, when America required relief after all the narratives about surrenders and sinkings and retreats, was the story of Air Corps Captain Colin P. Kelly. He is said to have immolated himself in the early days of the war by dropping a bomb, with the customary early-in-the-war precision, down the main stack of the Japanese battleship Haruna, and then, after ordering his crew to bail out, crashing his bomber into the foundering warship. (By the time of the kamikazes, this myth was forgotten, lest the kamikaze pilots be considered heroes rather than madmen.) Actually what Kelly damaged was not a battleship but a barely armed troop transport which did not sink, and he was killed not then but later, when a Japanese fighter jumped his plane. There is evidence he tried to bail out before anyone else but was carried down with the plane when his parachute caught on the escape door. (note omitted)1
And the need to stigmatize the vile enemy may help explain why this movie seems to have largely sunk out of sight,2, which I think is too bad, as not only does it deprive people of a chance to see how even history’s “good guys” use propaganda, but also a precedent for my own interest in self-sacrificing heroines. For those of you who don’t like the narrative arc that something like Auto-Icon is tending, what’s wrong with you? Self-sacrifice is a tradition with the imprimatur of patriotism! Are you anti-American, or something?
Notes
1Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Kindle electronic edition, Loc. 480. Back to main text.
My ineptness made me the last hired, first fired on the playground, and hence more than ever likely to be alone. Miss Tanner’s genial hounding continued so I conceived the idea of “takin an end for good” in jumprope. This way I could seem to be participating while remaining outside the fray. The girls who liked — yes liked –to jump rope hated having to take their turn at turning, so for a while I was popular in a windmillish sort of way. While I turned, I fantasized murdering watery moles and huggybears by walking into their midst with a hand grenade, concealed in my undershirt, like Veronica Lake blowing the Japs to bits with her loaded bra in So Proudly We Hail. It did not help. The thought of dying only made me feel worse.
See Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). p 73. Back to main text
Panel 1: Close-up view of Eliza’s right foot. A tentacle has wrapped itself around one of her ankles.
CAPTION – FUZZY BOX INDICATING RECOVERED SPEECH (1): ZZZ Oh I think its fssht pop
Translation (1): ЗЗЗ О, я думаю, это тшшш щелк<
SUBTITLE (2): Magnified and enhanced drone footage.
Translation (2): Видеозапись с робота (увеличение).
Panel 2: Tentacles now wrapped around both of Eliza’s legs.
CAPTION – FUZZY BOX INDICTING RECOVERED SPEECH (3): grrRRzzt yes get me fxzzshh take me tik
Translation (3) гррРРтшш да, бери меня тшшшш возьми меня
SUBITITLE (4): Recovered drone footage.
Translation (4): Видеозапись с робота.
Panel 3: Closer-in view, showing tentacles winding around Eliza’s midsection. One “sucker tentacle” has attached itself to her left nipple and another appears about to do so to her right one.
Single panel: Eliza assumes a position, vertical in the water, the sun shining down from the surface, the water blue around her, her arms outstretched, her hair streaming in the water, her eyes closed, her expression blissful.
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INT. THE SECURITY ROOM – NIGHT
Sam returns to consciousness. With agonizing effort he pulls himself up on his console, taps in a number on a keypad, flips up a cover and then presses the red button underneath.
Please do not reproduce this storyboard or its associated screenplay text without permission from Faustus, who may be contacted here.