Seamy soldiery

Rating: Null/10 (21 December 2008)

This has all the hallmarks of a film scratching away at the surface of a popular novel. The literary title seems ill-suited to the pettiness of much of the storyline and it fails to resonate even in the final fate of it's chief character, Prewitt (Montgomery Clift), which seems tagged on and unnecessary, like an alternative ending.
Soldiers patronise their officers and chase their wives, squabble amongst themselves, even murder each other over trivial issues that assume life and death importance under the pressure-cooker lid of army life. It's a nasty world of philandering, drunkenness, ineptitude, vanity, and boorishness. The women put the uniformed clowns into context, rejecting them for their inadequacy and their soldier-ant careers. The film pushes away at the edges of the Hays Code (Deborah Kerr really checks out Burt Lancaster as he's getting undressed  but you can't prevent people going for a swim) - but just when you think the film is doing an admirable job of showing the seamy side of humanity and building up to something powerful, it backs down as the boys predictably turn into heroes during the Pearl Harbor attack.
The main theme, the hard-head holding out against authority, is the same as in Zinneman's A Man For All Seasons, another film full of squabbling men with a downbeat ending. Clift and Sinatra (drunk much of the time) are outstanding, but the film belongs to Lancaster, bull-necked, angular as a piece of origami, who somehow manages to square uprightness and corruption, solidity and fallibility, and stands astride the rank and ruck of lesser men like a colossus. Classic stuff from the movies' greatest decade.