Description
A fascinating World War II Hollywood research photograph showing a small Socony gasoline station at Bataan in the Philippines, complete with its hanging Pegasus/Socony sign and period gasoline pump. More important is the documentation on the verso: “PHIL ISLANDS / Copied from photo belonging to Pvt Charles R. van Etten / for ‘SO PROUDLY WE HAIL’ / Gas Station at Bataan.” The photograph entered circulation as visual reference material connected with Paramount’s So Proudly We Hail!, the 1943 Mark Sandrich film starring Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake as American Army nurses caught in the Philippines during the opening months of World War II. The production took unusual pains to establish authenticity, working with military and nursing advisers while dramatizing the Bataan campaign.
That production history makes this much more than an anonymous photograph of an old filling station. It is a surviving piece of the visual research surrounding Hollywood’s attempt to recreate a battlefield that was, while the picture was being made, still part of an ongoing war. The Los Angeles Public Library Audio Visual Service /Paramount Pictures stamps provide additional institutional provenance, and the photograph was subsequently deaccessioned and sold through the Friends of the Library.
A terrific intersection of WWII Philippines history, early gasoline advertising, Hollywood production research and Los Angeles archival provenance.
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