L'île des sans soucis

I never heard of the movie until I saw it on TV about a year ago. I thought it was good, funny, and pretty much fit with the military style comedy genre of the late 50s, early 60s. Dick Shawn is good, but his supporting cast really makes the movie go.

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.

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.

The film parallels the book with a few risqué exceptions. What is unique is that even though major actors were picked for the movie they could not be closer to the character description from the 1959 book of the same name by Howard Singer.

Russ is a schnook. Therefore if something can go wrong it will. His wife is into insurance of all kinds. She wants him to get his GI insurance while he can. After she forces him to apply (schnook), he must explain that he has two serial numbers (schnook). When he was shot down over Germany he was presumed dead and needed a second number to get discharged (schnook). So naturally realizing that the (schnook) being in the service only one-day on the second serial number, is called up to finish his time.

He ends up on an island in the middle of the Sea of Japan. There he has a revelation that saves his sanity and that of 400 other servicemen also assigned to this remote outpost. A plan, so brilliant that I am not about to tell you what it is or how it is executed.

In the book the plan cured his shnookyness; in the movie, it takes a trial. The cast includes Dick Shawn as the schnook and Ernie Kovacs as his commander and hotshot fighter pilot.

I can relate to this as I also have two serial numbers. Luckily, they were for six completed years each.