The True Nature of Friendship: "The Hasty Heart" (1949)

Future President Ronald Reagan and Oscar nominee  Richard Todd  in a scene from the 1949 film "The Hasty Heart".

From Warner Brothers in 1949 came this wartime melodrama concerning a group of soldiers recuperating at a military hospital unit in Burma.  There is the usual mixed-bag of characters, representing the different Allied countries: England, Australia, New Zealand, The United States, etc. with future President Ronald Reagan playing "Yank", the token American soldier in the unit.  Head nurse is stoic Sister Parker, played adequately by future Oscar winner Patricia Neal, with little of the emotion that colored her later work in films like "A Face in the Crowd" and "Hud".  But despite Reagan and Neal getting top billing in the picture, the dynamic performance in the film is delivered by third named Richard Todd, whose fresh screen presence earned him a well-deserved Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor, and helped win him a Golden Globe as the Best New Actor of the Year.

The ruggedly handsome Todd plays 'Lachie' McLaughlin, a brash, proud Scotsman who is a new arrival at the unit, and is very much a loner, unconcerned with things like friendship and polite civility to his fellow man.  Early on, Sister Parker and the other patients (as well as the audience) are told that Lachie is terminally ill, and has in essence been sent to this unit to die, which he himself is totally unaware of.  Despite the efforts of this mini UN of bunkmates to be friendly to the Scotsman, Lachie is aggresive and standoffish towards all the other patients and Sister Parker.  He refuses to allow anyone to do any favors for him, and claims he never wants to be indebted to another person.

Sister Parker's efforts at kindness towards Lachie are read by him as romantic interest, which he also has no time for; all he has in mind is returning to Scotland to finish paying for the farm that he longs to own.  Eventually though, he does come to accept the friendship of the other soldiers, after they present him with a uniform kilt for his birthday.  His initially suspicious, distrusting nature begins to melt away, and he suddenly becomes a chatty, gregarious fellow, inviting each of them to come and stay with him on his Scottish farm when they are released from the unit.  His personality towards Sister Parker also does a 180 turn, and he becomes so charmed by her that he proposes marriage to her.  She hesitantly accepts, but is torn because she knows the true nature of his health.

Later on, Lachie is informed of his condition by the head of the hospital, and reverts to his bitter, jaded outlook, spurning the friendship of the others, and telling them that he doesn't want their friendship which he assumes was based only on pity for him.  It is only through the efforts of Blossom, an apparently shell-shocked black patient of undetermined nationality, that he realizes that the other men's intentions were real and not based on his illness.  As he is preparing to leave the unit to return to Scotland to die, Lachie has a true change of heart and decides that he wants to stay at the unit and die among his friends, the only ones he's ever really had in his life.

Reagan and Neal are fairly pedestrian in their roles here, and are all but blown off the screen by Richard Todd.  He inhabits every bit of Lachie's starchy standoffishness perfectly, hiding his insecurities and lonliness inside a huge mixture of pride and self-respect.  Likewise, when Lachie initially accepts the men's friendship, Todd conveys the change in Lachie not merely through his words, which become lighter and more open, but also through his body language: he allows himself to be casual, even comfortable around his fellow soldiers and drops the stiff, defensive posture he's held since the picture's beginning.  Like the soldiers, the audience may have pity for Lachie and the unfairness of his fate, but ultimately our appreciation for him comes from the change that he makes within himself, allowing himself to enjoy and even need the companionship of other people.  It is a lesson in the true meaning of friendship that is delivered most of all by the grand work of Richard Todd in "The Hasty Heart", a not altogether bad way to spend a couple of hours, if you get the chance to see it.