Del infierno al paraíso

"Wake Me When It's Over," as another reviewer commented, is an apt title for this film. Implying, in this case, that this film might be a challenge to stay awake while watching. Well, the idea for the plot surely is okay, but something with various complicated parts that this has needed a great script, excellent direction and a cast to deliver. The cast is so-so and mixed, but the screenplay for this film, and the writing, are poor.

So, what could have been a very good post-war comedy, turns out to be a weak attempt at a farce that just doesn't deliver. Hollywood was making some very good light comedies about military and government service during the 1950s and early 1960s, but this isn't one of them. I didn't read the novel the film is based on, but would guess it must be much better than this film. My five stars are for the efforts of some of the cast.

Not even most veterans or military service and war film buffs are likely to think much of this film.

What do you get when you combine two of the funniest stars who ever lived (Dick Shawn and Ernie Kovaks), with one hilarious scene by Don Knotts? Well, apparently you get a wacky knock-off of the (to me, more boring) "Teahouse of the August Moon," with army people building a hot springs resort hotel with surplus army equipment. Does it work?

First of all, it needs to be a whole lot wackier, considering the cast. Dick Shawn might've made it so if they'd turned him loose, but those were the days before Monty Python changed the face of comedy. Back then, comedies were thought to work when funny men were plugged into them, regardless of the material.

Is it worth watching? Only if you accept it for what it is, made in those far-flung days of the past, when movies were slower and spent time developing characters.

It doesn't really work, though it does give insight to government snafus and the waste of taxpayer dollars.

It's too bad Don Knotts didn't have a larger role.

Director Mervyn Leroy has done much, much, much better work over his long career than this mess. Supposedly a "comedy" about airmen at a forgotten Air Force base in Japan who turn their installation into a luxury resort hotel, everything about this picture is second-rate. Ernie Kovacs is a brilliant comedian but he plays it straight here and it doesn't work. Dick Shawn isn't a brilliant comedian and he also plays it straight--for the most part--and it doesn't work, either. The script is ham-fisted, and the supporting performances by a usually reliable cast of good character actors--Jack Warden, Don Knotts, Parley Baer and others--aren't much better than those of the leads. Former model Margo Moore--whose career didn't last very long--is around as Kovacs' love interest, but unfortunately they have absolutely no chemistry together whatsoever, and the "romance" comes across as stiff and forced, which pretty much describes the entire movie.

There are service comedies that are worse than this one--Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall's 1959 disaster "The Rookie" comes to mind--but there are also many, many better ones. Avoid this dud.

I've not read the Howard Singer novel, but seeing this film is going to send me straight to the library for it. I watched this on a whim, because I wanted to see an Ernie Kovacs film performance different from his turn in "Bell, Book, and Candle." The cast in this film--from Kovacs, to newcomer Dick Shawn, to the marvelous Marvin Kaplan, to a wonderfully subdued Jack Warden--is top-notch, and the writing is just splendid. The film takes on military bureaucracy, sexual mores, international relations, postwar backlash, and mixes it all up with the sort of hijinks that Sergeant Bilko was best known for. It's sheer delight.

Shawn is the victim of a bureaucratic snafu: listed as dead after having spent 2 years in a German P.O.W. camp, the Air Force decides to issue him a new serial number instead of reinstating his old one, then discharges him the next day. As a result, with only one day's service on his record, Shawn is re-drafted 7 years after his official discharge, and stationed on the remote Japanese island of Shima, where the hostile inhabitants still have a shrine to a downed Japanese plane.

The air base C.O. is a cavalier flyboy, played by Ernie Kovacs, with the only other real authority being the doctor, played by Jack Warden. The 100 men stationed there are bored out of their skulls (Don Knotts has a nice turn as the activities counselor), and with Shawn's arrival a plot is hatched to keep the men occupied, improve local relations, and dispose of a great deal of G.I. surplus material.

The movie is a little on the long side, and the subplot with the female lieutenant seems a little forced, but the action and snappy dialogue will keep you engrossed throughout.

Sadly, this film is not available on VHS or DVD, which is a crying shame. Watch for it on television; you won't regret it.

A resourceful airman (Shawn) gets assigned to a forgotten island installation in the Pacific. There he puts other apathetic airmen and locals to work building a popular hotel with abandoned government materials. However, the big brass don't take kindly to his enterprise.

It's a thin service comedy at a time when service comedies were popular, e.g. Mr. Roberts (1955), Operation Madball (1957). I can't help thinking Shawn is miscast as the principal lead. Frankly, he looks a little lost, at times. As a performer, he excels at zany parts both on stage and on screen, It's a Mad, Mad World (1963), for example. But here he's used in a fairly straight role as an occasionally amusing entrepreneur, a role any number of non-comics could have handled. Also, Kovacs looks zany in his unmilitary outfits, but has no one to play off of as he did with Jack Lemmon in Madball. So he has no real routines other than shimmying down a flagpole.

It also looks like director LeRoy, a Hollywood veteran, is somewhat indifferent to the material. There's no snap to the scenes or to the editing. And I'm not sure why, since he has a number of successful comedies in his resume. It may be he didn't care for the screenplay, which is anything but tight. Instead, it stretches out in somewhat meandering fashion. Too bad also that the stellar crew of comedic supporting players—Knotts, Strauss, Kaplan, go largely unused.

All in all, the movie's an overlong disappointment, despite the talent involved.