A war film well worth seeing despite a casting problem

Rating: 9/10 (1 January 2007)

This is a very good wartime soap opera--with a stronger emphasis on love than on war. The film stars a strong cast and all try very hard to make this an exceptional film. Burt Lancaster was very good as the 1st sergeant and Frank Sinatra was surprisingly good as a hot-headed G.I.--so much so, that this film rescued his flagging film career. The female love interests of Donna Reed and Deborah Kerr were also good--and Ms. Kerr did a good job of creating an American accent. However, for the life of me I cannot understand the decision to cast Montgomery Clift as Private Prewitt. While he was generally a good actor and did well in movies such as THE SEARCH, he was totally wrong for this part. I am assuming his recent popularity was the sole reason he was given this part, because physically he was all wrong. Clift played a guy who was supposedly a great middle-weight boxer--despite him being a very thin and delicate man who looked like he would have had a hard time beating Ms. Reed in a fight, let alone beat up two savage sergeants like he did in the movie. This appears to be yet another case of someone being cast for a role purely because he was a hot commodity at the time.
Fortunately, aside from one bad casting decision, the film was excellent--blending romance and wartime well and making for a very entertaining film. While not as great as you might expect from a film that earned so many Oscars, it is nevertheless an exceptional film.
FYI--The Japanese planes in the movie are actually American Texan trainers and SBD Dauntless bombers. Apparently there weren't any flight-worthy Japanese planes available, so the airplanes attacking Pearl Harbor are American ones!