Hollywood at its Best, Not Without Minor Flaws

Rating: Null/10 (20 November 2011)

This movie is clearly one of the highlights of the 1950s, a confident exercise in popular art. Everybody associated with the picture did a great job, but I do have some misgivings.
Probably inherent with the problem of reducing 900 pages of text to two or so hours, the film's pace is relentlessly fast. It's one of the few movies I can think of that could have used an extra 10-15 minutes to linger on key scenes and set up suspense. The famous beach scene goes by far too quickly. Even Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca had more time to get wetter in their Your Show of Shows parody. I also think that they should have spent a little more time setting up a peaceful, partly hung-over Saturday night/Sunday Morning before the Japanese attacked.
The against-type casting is justly celebrated for this movie, but are are some risks that didn't work out. I do think Deborah Kerr was a bit lost in her part. Nothing to do with her sexual persona, but the difficulties of playing an American and the impossibility of fully understanding the social milieu of American officers and wives. Kerr was very far from awful, but I sensed a tentativeness.
I'm really going to step into it by saying that Montgomery Clift was wrong for Prewitt. Just too pretty and sensitive to be both someone whose last resort in the 1930s was to join the Army or be a boxer. Robert Ryan comes to mind as a more convincing choice--just as sensitive and ethically torn, but more convincingly proletarian.
Donna Reed is great here, but I think the script let her down. The final scene between her and Kerr on the Lurline comes off as a misfired plot twist. Reed revealing herself as a fantasist going home to reinvent herself yet again inspires more "WTF?" than "Ah Ha!" I think there could have been slightly better set up earlier on with regard to the gap between her working life at the Congress Club and her almost college girl domestic setup bridged by her impressive powers of denial.
Technically, the Pearl Harbor attack was marred by insertion of some obvious file footage and I also winced when the camera lingered a second on a calendar marked "December 6." The best things in the movie are the cinematography, Ernest Borgnine, Burt Lancaster, and Philip Ober as the disgusting Captain Holmes. A real career-killer of a role. One of the things I've complained about is the movie's main strength: The script that strips down the novel to a censor-safe two hours. The audience knows what the Congress Club is about and that everyone wears their birthday swimsuit under their clothes at all times. Far more artful to deftly imply these things than make them obvious.
Still, a wonderful movie.