La guerre en dentelles

The Horrizontal Lieutenant has Jim Hutton assigned to the Army Intelligence division who has had one desultory war when toward the end of WW2 he gets an assignment in the Ryukyu Islands near Japan.

Hutton's mission is to find a Japanese soldier who hasn't surrendered and is stealing all kinds of supplies and he's become a folk hero to the natives. Not exactly looking for Mata Hari.

He might accomplish his task, but he's also spending time trying to score with nurse Paula Prentice whom he knew a bit before the war.

Hutton and Prentice are supported by such stalwarts as Charles McGraw, Jim Backus, Miyoshi Umeki, Jack Carter, and a good group of Asian players. The final capture scene with Hutton, Prentice and their quarry is hysterical.

If you like service comedies this is for you.

After the hilarious cartoon-accompanying theme song plays during the opening credits, this movie goes downhill. It's hard to believe, since the song's not that great, but it's true. So unless you really love the pairing of Jim Hutton and Paula Prentiss, you can skip this one.

Jim stars as a soldier who yearns to see action but is stuck behind a desk in Honolulu. When he gets transferred to the South Pacific, he hopes he'll have more of an adventure, but it's not exactly the case. The Japanese have surrendered months earlier, and there are no battles, interrogations, or dangerous missions. The most action he sees is the random run-ins with Paula, a girl he'd like to get to know if she'd stay in one place long enough.

There is one Japanese man on the island who still fights the Americans, though: Yuki Shimoda. Yuki's way of exacting revenge on his conquerors is to steal food from the mess hall, so even when Jim finds out he has an enemy, it's not exactly a dangerous one. With some slapstick, sex jokes, and silly situations, all in the style of 1962, it's easy to see that this movie doesn't really stand the test of time very well.

I believe that several persons here (including me) have given «The Horizontal Lieutenant» a rating above the average, because we liked the lead players, Jim Hutton and Paula Prentiss, who had good chemistry in all movies that they made together; and because the story has good potential that cannot be spoiled in its entirety, despite a not very good script.

I don't know what is the tone of the novel by Gordon Cotler that inspires this film, but the central plot can be treated as comedy or drama: during II World War a young G-2 officer (Hutton) is sent to a Japanese island to catch a thief, while he courts an old university girlfriend (Prentiss), whom he meets again working as a nurse. However, George Wells' script is old-fashioned, attached to moral standards that not even the military on the war front in the 1940s should have respected, especially with men and women in the same camp. We can understand the screenwriter was limited by the Production Code, but it was truly agonizing by 1962.

One more film like this and the careers of Prentiss and Hutton would have finished and, indeed, poor Jim Hutton had to endure one more silly comedy (with Connie Francis), in which Prentiss only made a brief appearance and received star status, after the doors were opened to her with Howard Hawks' "Man's Favorite Sport?"

The entire cast (especially Yoshio Yoda as Tada) struggles to get the best out of the story and a script with jokes that, in most cases, have no effect; or loses focus with endless interior sequences, like an interrogation conducted by an alcoholic officer (Jim Backus).

The basic premise could have had a sad or happy ending and the producers opted for comedy, so when «The Horizontal Lieutenant» ends, it leaves us with a smile on our faces, but little else. Richard Thorpe, a veteran with a career in the business since 1921, should have been bored by then, directing the young Metro actors, whose conduct and morals were surely foreign to him.

Jim Hutton and Paula Prentiss are cute and have good timing in their comedic delivery and all, but mostly this is a film searching for laughs and only rarely finding them. The pair get stationed on an American-occupied island during WWII with the task of looking for a Japanese holdout who has been pilfering supplies. It's light fare to say the least, but helped considerably by their presence. I have to say, it was also nice to see the representations of Japanese and Japanese-Americans with few stereotypes. One serviceman (Yoshio Yoda) is a ladies man, counter to the usual emasculation, and the holdout (Yuki Shimoda) kicks Hutton's ass for awhile upon being discovered. Plus, we get Miyoshi Umeki singing "How About You?" late in the film, which was just lovely. I only wish the story and the humor could have been better, or that the double entendre in the film's title could have led to a little more sizzle. As it is, it's cute, but not terribly exciting.

MGM had several fine players under exclusive contract in the l960's: George Peppard, Richard Chamberlain, Yvette Mimieux and Jim Hutton and Paula Prentiss. This film is one of the 4 Pairings that MGM made with Hutton and Prentiss and is my favorite film of that team and one of my favorite comedies of the l960's. Great movie teams have magic: Loy and Powell, Tracy and Hepburn, Lemmon and Matthau, and for sure Hutton and Prentiss. Hutton conveyed a manly comedic skill set and Prentiss from San Antonio a gorgeous tall Texan with a sexy voice. Richard Thorpe moves the action skillfully and so what most of the movie seems to have been filmed on the MGM back lot, it is a Fun film with all the top notch MGM production values and special effects. This film is so enjoyable one wonders why MGM let them stop filming as a Team after this film. They were announced for a comedy And Now To Bed about a playboy played by Hutton and an interior decorator played by Prentiss but both stars passed on that film. Too bad. One never tires of these two professionals. Fine support from a cast of well known character actors.

I recommend this movie