Wake Island
“America had been at war for nine months, but John Farrow's Wake Island was the first significant departure from the romantic, recruiting-poster style war movies that were general issue at the time. Newsweek described it as ‘Hollywood's first intelligent, honest, and completely successful attempt to dramatize the deeds of an American force on a fighting front.' An impeccable tough-guy cast, including Brian Donlevy, Robert Preston and William Bendix, is featured in a semi-fictionalized account of the courageous but doomed defensive action on the Pacific island base in December, 1941, by a handful of gallant, under-equipped Marines. The film was an enormous hit.”