A comedy of errors in which a pilot assumed dead is not dead; his widely celebrated last heroic kamikaze act has, in reality, been a sensible bail out; and his final message of affection, sent via aeroplane radio for Peggy, has been misheard – it is for Piggy, his dog. The wonderful team of Fred MacMurray as the pilot and Claudette Colbert (in her fourth and final film with Leisen) as a typewriter factory worker mistaken for “Peggy” deal with the consequences from a public that unshakingly believes in the printed legend. Leisen bursts the bubble with documentary footage that a filmmaker, as in Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, slows down and examines frame by frame. Despite his revelation that the pilot has not committed a suicide attack on a Japanese navy ship, people still refuse to believe the truth. This is all the more astonishing when one considers that the film was made while the war was still on, hardly the time for poking fun at the obsession with heroes. That was one of the reasons Practically Yours was attacked by critics, but even in later years it continued to be maligned, even by the Leisen cheering club. In fact, this is not only one of its director’s more complex films of the 1940s, but also his most direct in shattering the falsehood of the movies, and a film in whose every corner, in the words of James Agee, “there is a really remarkable amount and variety of coldly perceptive hatred”. Practically Yours offers the best entry into the cynical and sober side of a director wrongly perceived as drunk on glamour.

Ehsan Khoshbakht