Mister Roberts

This is a ghastly hodgepodge. It has four directors: Ford, Logan, LeRoy and Fonda.

Its so choppy in its being, its hard to tease out who is responsible for what, except for a few bits which don't merge. The John Ford bit is that repellent notion that real men (and for Ford that meant white nonJews) fight recreationally. Hey, its fun, especially if large numbers of the opposition are hospitalized. The Fonda bit is an earnestness that he felt should apply, especially to warfighters. The Logan bits are those you can see which try to place a man in the context of the time, softened by those sailor scamps.

So give up on trying to see this as a coherent film. It ain't, and Fonda disavowed it before it became a box office hit.

What's much more interesting and easy to do, is to contrast the four acting styles of the four leads. They are equally incoherent because of the weak direction, and interesting because you have four on screen worlds. There are never more than three at a time, but you have all combinations of two and three.

Powell is the one that seems the most appealing. His acting style is quite modern. It seems natural, but the timing is so perfect that if you look hard enough you can see great control. This is embodied acting, the kind we'd rediscover with Brando.

Lemmon's style is to fill the space around him with energy. Its so completely different. While Powell creates a character that lives in the world of the viewer, Lemmon creates a fictional being but goes more than halfway of the distance to us.

The other two are obsolete types today, though still remembered fondly. Cagney is a stage man, pure and simple. Every motion he makes, every expression, is something "big," designed to be "read" from the back rows. Where a crinkled forehead would work in a film, a whole body movement is required on the stage. Cagney gives us the whole body movement. A soul composed of grand dance moves.

Fonda is distinct from all the others. His style is the old studio style of developing a single persona that you can use for every film (and most appearances as yourself) and then just color it a bit here and there as the role requires. Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and Morgan Freeman are practitioners of this today. Its unsatisfactory because it is lazy. It fits the needs of the story to the limits of the actor. In this case, Fonda famously bent the role to his limited toolkit by literally firing the director until he got something that he thought fit what he could do.

Now take these four in combinations of two and three and watch these worlds collide. Students of war and that war in particular know that it was a matter of incoherent stories failing to integrate. That's what we have on screen here.

Watch this and afterward ask yourself whose world you think you belong to. It can be only one because such simple stories can accommodate only one narrative eye. It'll be a good indicator of your own inner character, I think, and how serious you are about your own life.

And isn't that the best of what the best of film can do?

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.