Avventura d'amore e di guerra

This 1961 movie about marines during the Korean War turns up on the Fox Movie Channel several times a year. It has excellent color and was directed by Raoul Walsh. Tom Tryon and David Hedison were bigger name "hunks" at the time and got first and second billing. But genuine tough guy Tom Reese is the real star here. Reese mainly did supporting villain roles during his career but he is excellent and really carries the movie. Reese and another genuine tough guy, Roy Jensen, have one of the best screen fist fights of all time. The timing and throwing of the punches and the sound effects of the landing blows really get the viewer's attention. Linda Hutchins is fourth billed and shows off a real sexy side. One negative is that all the bad people that the heroes encounter in Japan are anglos. All the Japanese are portrayed as good and decent, if a somewhat naive people. The brothel madame Is a blonde with a German accent. The bar owner who has his customers rolled and robbed is an American. The girl seen picking the pocket of a marine appears to be American. The woman trying to convince her marine boyfriend to desert is an American. All the nastier girls in the nasty bar are anglos. Clearly stereotyping but it's all in fun, I guess. The combat scenes are good and the characters are all interesting. Tom Reese showed he could carry an action film and handle every scene well. It's worth watching the next time it turns up on FMX.

I rated this a 5 overall. The first 1/2 of the movie is a 2 and the last 1/2 a 5 so I settled on a 3 overall because of the fact I am IN it! I was an engineer aboard one of the PAPa boats when landing on the beach in one of the war scenes. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't have rated the last half a 9 but probably a 6. If I had a choice of movies to be in this would not be one of them! The first of the movie is a very dull view of a bunch of drunken idiots who make fools of themselves in Japan. THE SECOND HALF DOES HAVE SOME DECENT war scenes when they hit the beach. The movie was filmed while the NAVY was doing maneuvers while in the P I Islands. They didn't have to pay for actors or the NAVY to film the maneuvers.

Bill MM2 US NAVY 1961-67

The story begins in Korea and you see some Marines fighting the enemy briefly. Soon, they are given leave and do what many American soldiers did during the Korean War...they all head to Japan to chase women and behave like total clods. Then, after a lot of hijinks, they head back to war....where you hope they're all blown to bits.

While the film is in color and clearly it had a budget far greater than an Ed Wood film, it is NOT particularly good. Most of this is because the writing and dialog are pretty bad...and the soldiers are easy to dislike. Even the exalted director, Raoul Walsh, couldn't make this script enjoyable.

By the way, a few things to mention. First, although IMDB says the film was made in Okinawa, one brief scene in particular was clearly filmed at Kinkaku-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan. Also, check out the biography for the hotel manager, Heihachirô Ôkawa. The information on IMDB is scant...but if you Google his name, you'll learn some interesting things about his life during and after WWII.

joebat23 was overly kind in his grading of this movie, it is absolutely terrible. The plot couldn't even be called sophomoric, the acting was atrocious and the reasoning of the characters was juvenile. Add to this the incredibly bad dialog and an "Intelligence department" that can't figure out what is going on when it should be painfully obvious and you have a movie that makes those Police Academy movies seem like high art worthy of a Nobel Prize.

The only reason I can think of to watch this movie is that a relative is in it and even then I don't think you should lest you lose any regard you have for that relative.

Oh, if you are expecting any even halfway decent battle scenes, forget it.

The script was bad and the acting was bad. It was supposed to be a comedy but it wasn't funny -- I would call it verbal slapstick, juvenile. I would expect 13 year olds to act like this, maybe, but not adults, not even in a comedy. The dialogue was unbelievably stilted. There wasn't a realistic moment in the film. All the Asians in the film were presented as caricatures. I tuned in to AMC part way through the film, actually not too long after it started, and kept watching it mainly to see the credits at the end. I didn't realize it would last another two hours. Another annoying aspect was the martial music they played non-stop. MASH, which debuted a few years later, was the movie they were trying to make but fell far short of.