In TENDER COMRADE Ginger Rogers joins up with three other women who work at the defense plant, and they form a little co-op and rent a house together. Then they hire a German maid, Manya, who has fled Hitler and who hates the Nazis more than anything. They decide to pool their four salaries, and to split the money five ways (one share for the maid) after paying for the rent and groceries. Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote this script and at times his Communust leanings really show through. Ginger must have hated saying some of the lines she's given.
Ruth Hussey plays one of the women, whose husband is overseas but she doesn't see anything wrong with dating men who can take her out to a nice dinner. She also likes to hoard goods and she loves the black market; in short, she's everything that women on the homefront were told not to do, and so she's constantly at loggerheads with Ginger and the other two defense plant workers. Kim Hunter, impossibly young, plays Doris, a girl who got married so fast that the only photo she has of her husband is one of him on a bike at the orphanage (looks like he's ten in the photo).
Ginger's love life with her husband is shown in flashback. He is played by Robert Ryan and the two of them are very sexy together. Their theme song, which Ginger hums and sings, is YOU MADE ME LOVE YOU and wait till you see the scene where she's dressed in a Daisy Mae-type sunsuit drying her hair with a big towel. She looks a lot like Kim Basinger!
It's a sad movie but mostly kind of preachy, all about how after the war the US is going to be a happy place, whereas look what happened, it was not the socialist paradise Trumbo predicted.