O Amor Custa Caro

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.

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.

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.

Caught the movie while surfing, and would've kept on looking except they mentioned they were going to Yokosuka Japan for leave. Having been stationed in Yokosuka the year it was released, I had to stick around to see if they'd show any part of it. The movie kept mentioning the Ginza, which of course, is in Tokyo. They probably were trying to refer to Honcho Street in Yokosuka, which was the main sailor bar street, and was definitely not the street they showed at night in the movie. When they entered an alleged Yokosuka bar, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Instead of a small, dingy, crowded bar with tables, booths and bar girls hustling fleet sailors for drinks, it was like a 50's night club in America, complete with tablecloths and lamps on tables with a stage and chorus girls. IOW, nothing like any of the bars I saw in the two years I was stationed there. We base sailors, at the Naval Communications Station there had our own bar, the Bar Midnight, which was an all-night bar, not subject to cinderella liberty rules, as were the Honcho Street bars. My first question was 'Why name Yokosuka as a destination city for leave, which they constantly referred to as 'furlough', an Army term..If you arrive by ship, perhaps, but Tokyo would've been the destination for R&R from Korea, not Yokosuka. There was a Marine barracks on the base, but their main duty was guarding the Main Gate, running the Brig and firing the 105 mm howitzers at ceremonies, not running an 'intelligence unit' on base. And come to think of it, I don't remember ever seeing a Marine Shore Patrol unit off-base. My second question was 'Who the hell wrote this . . . crud?' A very derivative movie, nothing original or truly funny.

Marines Let's Go is a film about a group of leathernecks on leave in occupied Japan just before the outbreak of the Korean War. It's the usual hijinks you find in service comedies. Tom Tryon and David Hedison went on to have some substantial careers.

Tom Reese is the leader of the group, I imagine because Raoul Walsh couldn't get Lee Marvin for the part. Reese is the sort that seems to be only happy in combat. The kind us poor civilians should give a wide berth to.

The film should have ended right when the Marines are put on alert and the leaves canceled. It was an average enough comedy, but it got kind of silly when it turned abruptly serious during the beginning of the Korean War. Ruined the film, the combat situations were hardly convincing.

No wonder Raoul Walsh couldn't get any name players for this one.