Corregidor Reviews

Badly produced routine WW II propaganda film presents little action, using the heroic stand on "The Rock" in spring 1942 as a weak backdrop for an even weaker love triangle. Two doctors, Kruger and Woods, compete for the love of a third physician, Landi, when they are not operating on the endless lines of wounded soldiers inside an underground tunnel. Corregidor was honeycombed with such tunnels, which allowed the poverty row PRC studio to confine its scenes to such claustrophobic quarters and to use stock footage of Japanese troops in their conquest of China a decade earlier. Only Kruger gives a palatable performance in a crudely directed vehicle. The beautiful Landi, an Italian actress of limited talent, had appeared in only a few significant films, including DeMille's SIGN OF THE CROSS, before she was shunted into cheap productions such as this. She was first given a hefty contract by William Fox in the early 1930s, when he believed the story that her mother, Countess Zenardi Landi, was the illegitimate offspring of Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Hollywood, then nobility-struck, offered contracts right and left to anyone claiming a lofty title.