Tender Comrade 
Three female welders at Douglas Aircraft Factory—led by Ginger Rogers—set up a communal residence while their husbands are overseas fighting in World War II. Expertly mounted by director Edward Dmytryk, this panoramic portrait of resilience on the home front was seen as patriotic propaganda on its initial release. However, Dmytryk and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo would both be subsequently indicted by HUAC, with this film used as evidence of the filmmakers’ anti-capitalist, communist views.  

Sahara 
Humphrey Bogart heads up a ragtag platoon as they battle Nazis crossing the sun-beaten wilds of the film’s namesake desert. Joining Bogie’s small detachment on their war-beaten tank are six Allied stragglers, a Sudanese corporal (Rex Ingram) and his Italian prisoner (Academy Award–nominee J. Carrol Naish). Directed by Zoltan Korda with the same visionary expensiveness of his earlier arid adventure The Four Feathers (1939), Sahara was co-written by John Howard Lawson, the co-founder and first president of the Screen Writers Guild, and the so-called “Dean” of the Hollywood Ten.