6/10
Five on the back hand side
12 April 2008
Warning: Spoilers
***SPOILERS*** Driving his fellow workers to the local defense plant old man Jim Benson, Charles Arnt, tries to liven up the place, with no one on board as much as saying boo, by trying to figure out what his fellow workers did for a living before war broke out. It's then, between incidents, leading to the defense plant we get to see what put this odd lot of people together in the first place.

There's Lisette, Margo, a refugee from Hitler's Europe. Working with the French Resistance Lisette's job was to sabotage the Nazis occupying her country with her, with the help of an illegal short-wave radio, cutting into Hitler's speeches, singing the French National Anthem, whenever they were broadcast on Radio Berlin. Not realizing that her voice will be recognized by the Nazis Lisette is arrested and given the opportunity to live if she sang for them "Deutschland Uber Alles". Acting as if she's going along with the Nazis the first chance that she gets Lisette jumps into the River Seine in an attempt to kill herself.

Not only did Lisette survive she also found out who turned her and her fellow Resistance fighters into the Nazis and exposed who he was. This lead to the Quisling to be shot and killed by the angry Frencmen and Lisette getting a ride out of occupied France, with the help of the French Resistance, and to freedom in America.

Moodly looking Joe Dunham, Robert Ryan, was a bit ticked off in not being able to enlist into the US Army Air Force. Joe being a professional race car driver banged himself up just before he was to join the military to fight Fascism all over the world. With Jim Benson's car blowing out a tire Joe does help in the war effort by fixing the damaged wheel. By doing that Joe enables himself and his fellow defense workers get to the plant and assemble the military hardware, planes tanks and artillery, in order to defeat the Fascist's hoards.

Former prison warden Tom Burke, James Bell, is by far the oddest of the bunch riding in old man's Fred Benson's car. Burke's past has to do with him having his brother Dan get electrocuted for a quadruple murder. This despite having the governor call off the execution by giving Dan a stay! Whatever Dan did, that included giving his and his brother Tom's mom a fatal heart attack, the law is the law. That includes halting a state authorized execution when the state governor calls it off!

Mary Jones, Amelita Ward, a former Miss America left her boyfriend Bob, William Terry, for her career as a showgirl and product, like buck wheat pancakes, endorser. It's when Mary sees that Bob joined the USAAF and is stationed in Australia that she gives up her entertainment and showbiz career to work at the plant assembling air planes, that Bob and his fellow airmen will need, to bomb the Japs into oblivion. Like the two B-29's that did a number on them at the close of the war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The last member of old man's Benson's carpool is former intellectual Wellington, John Carradine, who dropped out of society and became a bum riding the rails and not keeping up with the news of the world. It turns out to his shock that Wellington, after being arrested for vagrancy, learned that his country, the USA, is at war while he, instead of aiding in the war effort, is just bumming around and doing nothing to help. Getting a job for the first time since the beginning of th Great Depression or ever earlier Wellington is now making weapons of mass destruction, WMD's for short, to finally put an end to those who want to do both him and his fellow Americans in.

A bit on the strange side even for a movie made to boost the publics moral during wartime "Gangway for Tomorrow" celebrates those, for one reason or another, who stayed behind the lines to do what they can in helping America fight and eventually win WWII. We see the results of those tireless and patriotic workers , in Benson's car, as the movie finally comes to an end: A sky full of heavy bombers on the way to the war zones. These thousands of planes that they, the plant workers, assembled are in the end going to win the war for the allies .
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