A stage comedy about a cargo ship the war forgot, carried by four actors who could carry anything. The direction changed hands and it shows, and the comedy is louder than the material needs, but the sadness underneath is real and Fonda makes it count.
Thomas Heggen’s novel became a Broadway play, the play became this film, and Henry Fonda came with it, having played Roberts on stage before the cameras arrived. That history is on the screen. Mister Roberts is a war film in which nobody fires a shot, set on a Navy cargo ship in the Pacific in the last months of the Second World War, and its subject is what the war did to the men it forgot. It is a good film, often a funny one, carried by four actors at the top of their form, and for long stretches of its middle it is broader and louder than it needs to be.
The credits list two directors, and the reviews since have told the story: John Ford started it and fell ill, and Mervyn LeRoy finished it. Whoever shot what, no single hand is on the film. Scenes are played out on deck as they would be on a stage, with the actors arranged along the rail and the camera set back to watch. Winton Hoch, who shot She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man for Ford, gives the ship a hard, bright heat: the sea is flat, the sky is white and the paint on the bulkheads looks sweated on. That is the right look for a film about boredom. Jack Murray cuts patiently and lets speeches run. Franz Waxman’s score is jaunty and nautical and rather too pleased with itself, arriving a second after each joke to confirm that it landed.
Fonda holds it together. Roberts is adored by the crew and wants off; he writes for a transfer every week, and every week Morton refuses to forward it. Fonda plays him with almost nothing, a lean man leaning on a rail. Early on, a fleet of warships steams past on the horizon at dusk while Roberts watches from the deck, and Fonda does not move, and the film waits with him. It moved us more than we thought a scene of a man looking at ships could. Everything the film has to say about wasted years is in that face, and it says it without a line.
James Cagney’s Morton is the villain, and Cagney makes him small rather than large: a man who came up through the ranks, resents every college boy on his ship and has decided that a palm tree in a pot is the sum of his achievement. He barks, but the barking is fear. William Powell, in his last screen role, plays Doc as the ship’s only grown-up, turning medicinal alcohol into something drinkable and speaking like a man who has stopped expecting anything. And Jack Lemmon, as Pulver, is the reason people still put this film on. Pulver has hidden from the captain for over a year and spends his days devising elaborate revenges. Lemmon plays him as a boy who talks fast so nobody will notice he has done nothing, and we laughed harder at him than we have at any comedy of this age in some time.
The trouble is the crew. Heggen and Joshua Logan wrote them as a chorus and Frank S. Nugent’s screenplay leaves them one; Ward Bond’s Dowdy is a face and a voice, and the rest are names on a roster. When the film hands them a shore leave in the middle, the comedy goes wide, with brawls and arrests and men carried back up the gangway, and what was rueful becomes a service farce any studio could have made. Betsy Palmer’s Ann Girard gets one good scene of being looked at through binoculars and is then put away; the script has no further use for a woman. Moss Mabry keeps everyone in salt-stained khaki, and Pulver’s shirts are better pressed than anyone else’s, which is the right joke for a man with nothing to do.
Against Ford’s own work this is nowhere near the top; there is none of the composure of his westerns, and no landscape for men to stand in, only a deck. Against the service comedies that came after it, it looks like the source: war as paperwork and waiting, with authority as the enemy and the fighting somewhere over the horizon. Most critics have liked it about as much as we do.
It runs 123 minutes and a fair half hour of that is men shouting on a deck. Put up with it for the rest, which belongs to Fonda, Powell and Lemmon, one of them at the end of a career and one at the start. Watch it on a hot evening with the windows open.
