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**** SPOILERS THROUGHOUT **** This is a very strange film - particularly for its time - in every respect. For six years, American movies had shown American soldiers as everybody's son, brother, father.
In movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and Til the End of Time, our hearts are tugged by the difficulty that the sweet returning soldiers have in adjusting to peace and their families. Yet in this same year, this film shows soldiers as a mix of people rather worse than the viewer - one message of this film is - "lock up your daughters."
Even the good soldiers - with plenty of time on their hands - are gambling all the time, getting stupefyingly drunk, and are wholly indifferent to whether they even have wives any more. And their reaction to the police investigating a murder is -- to conspire against them.
Mitchum, the most sympathetic soldier says things like "I don't know if my wife wants to make a go of it now after the War. Haven't seen her in two years. Do I care? Not really. Maybe we'll make a go of it, maybe not."
Another soldier is shown as unusually sensitive because after years away, he would like to see his wife again.
Later, when this soldier states at the police station that he spent the evening at a whore's home - without knowing his wife is sitting just behind him, there seems to be no question whatever that his wife will be fine. Indeed, she is - I guess it's "Hey, soldiers will be soldiers".
The police detective played by Robert Young who is trying to crack a murder case, states convincingly and with infinite weariness about someone's account of their actions on the night in question,
"Do I care? No. I don't really care about anything any more. I've done this too long, I guess."
A man shows up at the whore's apartment. He says "I'm just a man like you, interested in" the whore. Then he says, "No that's a lie, I'm her husband. I'd like to be in the military, I was turned down before." T
hen he says, "No, that's a lie, why would I want to be a soldier?" He goes through another series of lies when the police ask him who he is. To the end of the movie, we haven't a clue who he is or why he is there!He's one of the strangest characters in the history of movies!
A man stands with his girlfriend at a bar talking to four soldiers, when a clumsy soldier knocks a drink onto his girlfriend. She leaves to change her dress - and is right back wearing another, no problem. Yet the man doesn't leave with his girlfriend - who simply disappears - but instead follows one of the soldiers when he leaves to go to another area of the bar! The man then extrapolates from the minimal information he's learned about the soldier -- to philosophize grandly about the problems of returning soldiers -- and immediately invites the soldier home because he is drunk and feels sick. This is strange stuff.
Similarly, a dance hall girl is irritated by the sentimental soldier who would like to take her out "for a real dance - and dinner maybe". Yet she does dance with him - and immediately gives him the key to her home!
Were people in the late 1940s always urging soldiers to come to their homes after they just met them?
Robert Ryan kills his host, a stranger, when he's enraged that the Jewish host tries to get the steadily drunker Ryan out of his home. The reason for the murder? "No Jew tells me how to drink". "How to drink?" Huh? What does that mean?
This movie is always off-kilter, quite deliberately so - the soldiers act consistently with total complete defiance of the law, and all the characters are as cold and tough as any movie I've ever seen.
And yet the movie is utterly gripping! You simply have no idea how these people are going to act - or what new bizarre character is going to pop up - without anyone thinking the person's actions are strange in the least - e.g., the wife's behavior.
The acting is about the finest I'e ever seen - from Robert Young, Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame (who earned an Oscar nomination), Paul Kelly and other actors I'd never heard of.
I'd never heard of this movie - and it's a complete delight that I've discovered one that I shall want to see again and again and again. it's really strange but impossible to look away from because you've no idea what these creatures will do next.


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