The
extremely popular 1955 movie Mister Roberts began as a 1946 novel by
Thomas Heggen. It was then a Broadway play written by Heggen and Joshua Logan, directed
by Logan, and produced by Leland Hayward. Henry Fonda played the title role of
Lieutenant Doug Roberts on Broadway and won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a
Play for his performance. It then made sense for Fonda to reprise the role in
the motion picture, which was also produced by Hayward and co-scripted by Logan
and Frank S. Nugent. Sounds like a Hollywood no-brainer in the making, right?
The
direction of the film is where things got dicey. John Ford was hired to direct,
but according to Hollywood scuttlebutt accounts, Ford and James Cagney (in the unflattering
role of the captain, Lieutenant Commander Morton) did not get along. Then,
during filming Ford and his old friend Henry Fonda got into a fight. Ford left
the production and was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy. When it was all done, Joshua
Logan himself got involved and reshot some sequences, but he is uncredited.
Despite
all this confusion, Mister Roberts turned out surprisingly well as a
comedy-drama (mostly comedy). It was a box office hit and was nominated for the
Best Picture Oscar. Oddly, Fonda was not nominated; granted, his steady,
assured, and contemplative role is not a showy one for the big screen.
Instead, Jack Lemmon delivered a big colorful extroverted breakout
performance as Ensign Pulver. He was nominated and won the Best
Supporting Actor Oscar. In many ways, Lemmon’s characterization in the movie
defined many of the actor’s later roles. One can see a bit of “Ensign Pulverâ€
in almost everything Lemmon did for the next two decades. Or perhaps that’s
just Jack Lemmon.
The
excellent cast is rounded out with an aging William Powell as the ship’s
doctor, Betsy Palmer as one of the few women who briefly appear in the picture,
and shipmates Ward Bond, Ken Curtis, Nick Adams, Patrick Wayne, and other faces
one might recognize from the era.
The
Reluctant is a U.S. Navy cargo ship stuck out in the boondocks of the
Pacific as World War II is winding down. Captain Morton (Cagney) rules the boat
with an insensitive, downright mean iron hand, and every man on the ship can’t
stand him. The executive officer, “Mister†Roberts (Fonda), on the other hand,
is well-liked and a friend to the men. It’s always up to Roberts to try and
stand up to Morton, with little success. Roberts bunks with Ensign Pulver
(Lemmon), a joker and lothario who gets away with doing as little work as
possible and who yearns for shore leave so he can woo some army nurses.
Roberts’ best friend is “Doc†(Powell), who must lend an ear to Roberts’
constant wishes to transfer off the supply ship and onto a real battleship to
see some action before the war is over. The entire movie then becomes a comedy
of wills between male egos—not just between Roberts and Morton, but among
everyone else as well.
The
sexist attitudes of the men toward the few women in the picture (nurses
stationed at an army base on a nearby island) were assuredly realistic for the
years depicted and when the movie was released, but today they are a cause for
some eye-rolling. The macho testosterone-laden one-upmanship on display also gets
a little nutty, especially in Cagney’s over-the-top performance… but overall Mister
Roberts is an entertaining romp with some laughs and Hollywood star power.
Warner
Archive’s Blu-ray release is a restoration of a previous DVD edition and looks
quite good—the problems come in some of Winton C. Hoch’s original
cinematography (in CinemaScope and “WarnerColorâ€!). There are several
foreground/background focus issues throughout the movie, but perhaps filmmakers
were just becoming accustomed to the widescreen format in those days. The
feature film comes with scene-specific audio commentary by Jack Lemmon himself.
There are no other supplements save the theatrical trailer.
Mister
Roberts still
holds up—just—as a good example of the kind of Hollywood fare in the 1950s that
attempted to look back at the world war with humor and nostalgia instead of
with sobriety or horror. The new Blu-ray is certainly for fans of Henry Fonda,
Jack Lemmon, and widescreen wartime antics.
