Tender Comrade
1943 film by Edward Dmytryk

Tender Comrade is a 1943 black-and-white war drama film released by RKO Radio Pictures, showing women on the home front living communally while their husbands are away at war.
The film stars Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey, and Kim Hunter and was directed by Edward Dmytryk. The film was later used by the HUAC as evidence of Dalton Trumbo spreading communist propaganda. Trumbo was subsequently blacklisted.
The film's title comes from a line in Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "My Wife" first published in Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896).
Plot
Jo Jones works in an airplane factory and longs for the day when she will see her husband again. The couple have a heart-wrenching farewell at the train station before he leaves for overseas duty. With their husbands off fighting in World War II, Jo and her co-workers struggle to pay living expenses. Dissatisfied, they decide to pool their money and rent a house together. Soon after, they hire Manya, a German immigrant housekeeper.
“Tender Comrade” enters the record as 1943 film by Edward Dmytryk. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tender, Comrade and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Tender Comrade” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Tender, Comrade and film provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1848202. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tender Comrade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.