Hotel Street Boogie.

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2009)

Interwoven tales of two mismatched couples on Oahu: (1) dedicated soldier Montgomery Clift and ambitious hooker Donna Reed who wants to return to the states rich enough to snag a proper husband, and (2) authoritarian but sensitive top sergeant Burt Lancaster and self-pitying officer's wife, Deborah Kerr, who finds salvation in their love.
Daniel Taradash adapted the screenplay from James Jones' immensely popular novel of the early 1950s, and the movie was directed by Fred Zinnemann. They both must have had a heck of a time with it.
Taradash had to meet all the requirements of the movie code of the period. That meant that the villainous Captain Holmes, instead of being promoted for his sadism and inefficiency, must resign under threat of a court martial. It turns an ironic and brutally realistic story into a fairy tale. Donna Reed, instead of being a whore, does get promoted by this movie -- to a kind of paid but chaste female escort. I can't imagine how the writer slipped her line past the censors: "If you keep drinking you'll be as much use as a melted candle." Kerr's unfaithful wife is in, but the syphilis is out. Also out is Clift's spell in the stockade, in which the prisoners beat each other bloody in games, in order to gin up their resistance to the beatings by the MPs. In the novel, Clift's character maintains his sanity in solitary by practicing meditation. (I swear I'm not making that up.) Director Zinnemann had his problems too. The casting, unquestionably, is nearly perfect. With the exception of a weak performance from Donna Reed, you can't beat the choice of the leads or the chief supporting players. Sinatra does one of his two outstanding dramatic roles, the other being "Manchurian Candidate." And Clift is impeccable as the beautiful young man who was an expert at soldiering, bugling, and boxing. The problem is that the actor was almost always drunk or strung out. He carried around a thermos full of fruit juice and vodka and was pounding innumerable psychotropic drugs. Zinnemann tried no end of takes during a scene in which Angelo Maggio's body is loaded into an ambulance and Clift's line is "See you don't bump his head." Fred finally gave up. Fred also had a problem with Clift's fighting, in that Clift didn't know how to make a fist, let alone throw a punch. The use of a stand in during the brawl on the grass is obvious, and the editor had to make sure that none of the medium shots revealed too much of Clift's hands.
Philip Ober as the scurrilous Company Commander acts like he's in a cheap B movie, and Donna Reed sounds like an amateur, but everybody in the cast LOOKS right. I shouldn't sound too harsh. I'm sure Philip Ober (a familiar face) was smart enough to realize he was in a potential blockbuster and gave it everything he had. It's just that he didn't HAVE anything.
It's also mandatory to mention here the photography, wardrobe, and location shooting. The barracks LOOKS like Schofield Barracks should have looked in 1941. The crummy urban street full of cat houses, tattoo parlors, and drunken enlisted men LOOKS like Hotel Street, though it was shot at the studio's back lot. Even the HASP, or "the MPs", as Sinatra's character calls them, look right -- huge, bemuscled pituitary cases -- the kind of agents of social control that sober you up with celerity if you note their walking your way. And I've never gotten over the tan summer uniforms of khaki drill cotton. You can almost feel the fabric.
Two scenes are memorable. One -- parodied a thousand times -- has Lancaster and Kerr rolling around and smooching in the Hawaiian surf while a wave rushes over their bodies. The other is the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, brief, and with multiple inserts of newsreel footage and shots from an earlier documentary by Gregg Toland, but exciting and well done.
A gripping film that ends unhappily, but unforgettable. It may lead some people to read the novel. The novel opens unexpected doors into human nature. Jones knew whereof he spoke.