Mister Roberts

The TV series "Mister Roberts" was a sitcom based on the same source material as the famous film (and stage play). The TV series is only occasionally funny, and it never offers the dramatic conflicts of the play and the film. Still, this is an interesting example of how an ongoing TV series has entirely different story demands from a one-off movie or stage play. The original novel, play and film 'Mister Roberts' are largely concerned with the efforts of naval officer Roberts to get out of his safe posting aboard the U.S.S. Reluctant (a cargo ship in the Pacific during World War 2) so that he can receive a transfer to hazardous duty in a combat zone. In a TV series, we know that this transfer will never happen because we need to keep Roberts aboard the Reluctant for each week's TV episode.

Also, the original novel 'Mister Roberts' and its stage adaptation were rather startling (at the time) for their bawdiness, entirely appropriate to the story's theme of sex-starved sailors on extended sea duty. As a TV series in the mid-1960s, 'Mister Roberts' has no chance of any real sexual content ... so we get nothing to compare with the famous incident (in the novel, play and film) in which the sailors use a high-powered telescope for some long-distance voyeurism, spying on the nurses' showering facilities on a beach several miles away.

What we do get in the TV version of 'Mister Roberts' is some slapstick sitcom humour, and it's not bad of its kind. Probably the funniest episode in this sitcom is 'Oh, Captain! My Captain!' in which Captain Morton (the Reluctant's C.O.) is replaced by a German spy who is his exact double. The ship's captain is played by veteran character actor Richard X. Slattery, a former cop who actually looked like one. In this episode, the real captain and the fake captain confront each other in double-exposure. We can tell which one is the German because he wears a monocle and speaks in a hokey German accent. The German spy has planted a time bomb aboard the Reluctant, concealed in the captain's palm tree. This is fairly funny if one recalls the significance of that palm tree in the original novel.

Bland actor Roger Smith gives a bland performance in the lead role as Mister Roberts. Some of this isn't Smith's fault: his character has been deprived of his major motivation (the desire to transfer to a combat posting) so Roger Smith hasn't much to do here except act as straight man to his galley-west shipmates.

George Ives, a character actor who deserved to be better known, is quite good as Doc, the ship's medical officer. Ives's underplayed performance occasionally seems to be inspired by William Powell, who played Doc so brilliantly in the movie version.

The real hit of this series is Steve Harmon, an actor otherwise unknown to me, as Ensign Pulver. Harmon is brilliant in this role. He has a naturally comic face and a gift for physical comedy, and his characterisation as Pulver owes absolutely nothing to the performances of Jack Lemmon or David Wayne in the previous versions. Harmon plays Pulver as a conniving lecher who's totally incompetent, with a permanent look of wide-eyed innocence on his face.

The interplay between the lead actors is excellent. One episode features an hilarious scene between Ives, Slattery and Harmon in which Doc is trying to perform a psych test on the Captain while using Pulver as a control. The problem is that Pulver is fixated on sex, so all his answers are skewed accordingly.

Just occasionally, this series managed a realistic depiction of daily routine aboard a military ship. In one episode, Roberts and Pulver manage to get hold of a live hen. After months of powdered eggs and other Navy prog, the two officers are delighted at the chance of regular access to real eggs. They smuggle the hen into their cabin, somehow silencing her clucks while she furnishes them with eggs. But then word gets out, and all their shipmates want eggs too. How does it end? Here's a clue: "Chicken overboard!"

'Mister Roberts' had a nice theme tune, vaguely nautical ... and much is made of the dilapidated appearance of the un-seaworthy rustbucket U.S.S. Reluctant as she ploughs the sea lanes. But this sitcom fails to blend its comedy with the urgent desperation of war and the deadly boredom of wartime routine. There wasn't a truly great military sitcom until the arrival of 'M*A*S*H' (the hilarious Sergeant Bilko series wasn't very military), and the TV 'Mister Roberts' inevitably suffers in comparison to the splendid film version and the even better stage play. I'll rate this series 6 out of 10.

While overall the series isn't so great, contrary to the narrow-minded opinions of some, Roger Smith rather really makes the show, and was anything but bland for those who live in the real world instead of Hollywood delusion; he carries it well in a noble way unknown in our day where sleaze and stupidity reign, why there are so many remakes that exhibit the sad extent of the gross inability of today's demented narcissist fascist perverts to make watchable films with only rare exceptions. So casually and foolishly to label him as "bland" is merely to demonstrate appalling lack of appreciation for his great and heroic soul and talents, first of all as a man, that inevitably spills over into his noble character, Doug Roberts; one of the things I love so much about this man is how I find him merely being his own heroic self rather than merely acting a part, and those of us who know the manly battles he's fought in his own life love him so for it, a truly great man by any realistic standard; his devotion with sole custody to his three children from his first marriage, as well as his devotion to his second marriage of 40+ years to Ann-Margret in spite of the great struggles both had says more than words ever could. The silly reviewer who criticized the show for not being realistic enough needs to get a life, for, being a situation comedy, it never intended to be realistic and surely it's creators didn't imagine anyone would be foolish enough to expect it to be!

Coming ten years after the classic film made from the iconic Broadway play and that based on a best selling novel, Mister Roberts had a lot to live up to. Try as they may the cast simply couldn't do it and that's a shame because they did their best.

One has to remember that all the other works of Mister Roberts even with all the roughhouse comedy put in especially by John Ford that the film dealt with some serious issues. Navy regulations make the captain of any ship the equivalent of God. The problem that the S.S. Reluctant has in sailing from tedium to apathy to boredom is a captain who enjoys the privileges of command without the concern for those underneath him.

The character of Captain Morton is really the pivotal one. This is a man who writes people up for keeping their shirts untucked or even wearing them in a cargo hold that's got a temperature of over 100 Fahrenheit degrees. And for his own amusement would keep these guys from shore leave liberty. Mister Roberts performs a necessary function as a buffer between the crew and the captain. And he'd like very much to get into the shooting war, it's what he signed up for.

There's serious underlying drama in Mister Roberts that comes to a head in all the previous work. But here the drama is gone and it simply becomes an average military service comedy, all right but no particular distinction.

Roger Smith, Richard X. Slattery, Steve Harmon, and George Ives were also up against the memories of Henry Fonda, James Cagney, Jack Lemmon, and William Powell, four of the biggest Hollywood icons you could find. These guys were inevitably going to suffer by comparison.

The show gave it a try, but it was up against too much.