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.

Director Mervyn Leroy has done much, much, much better work over his long career than this mess. Supposedly a "comedy" about airmen at a forgotten Air Force base in Japan who turn their installation into a luxury resort hotel, everything about this picture is second-rate. Ernie Kovacs is a brilliant comedian but he plays it straight here and it doesn't work. Dick Shawn isn't a brilliant comedian and he also plays it straight--for the most part--and it doesn't work, either. The script is ham-fisted, and the supporting performances by a usually reliable cast of good character actors--Jack Warden, Don Knotts, Parley Baer and others--aren't much better than those of the leads. Former model Margo Moore--whose career didn't last very long--is around as Kovacs' love interest, but unfortunately they have absolutely no chemistry together whatsoever, and the "romance" comes across as stiff and forced, which pretty much describes the entire movie.

There are service comedies that are worse than this one--Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall's 1959 disaster "The Rookie" comes to mind--but there are also many, many better ones. Avoid this dud.

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. 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.

I just don't know what movie these other reviewers saw, but the movie I saw had no jokes at all. It had the set ups for jokes and people who can certainly be funny, Kovacs and Shawn for just two, but they aren't funny here. A complete waste of your time and as far as paying money for it, absolutely out of the question. It does not make fun of bureaucracy in the military. MASH makes fun of that. This just drones on and on with stupid situation after stupid situation. I wanted another "Operation Mad Ball", so believe me I get wacky military humor, that movie had it, this movie does not. Idiotic in tone, concept and delivery. I really hated this movie. No wonder it was buried on Fox Movie Channel. I will not miss Fox Movie Channel. There is a reason that you never hear of these movies.

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.