The acclaim went to the wrong actor here. Mickey Rooney got the Oscar nomination, but after a 30 year career, it seems to me that he's basically playing the same bombastic boy man he'd been playing since the war began 15 years before this. For me, the best performance comes from Don Taylor as the very religious soldier who by chance meets beautiful Nicole Maurey just walking down the road, finding out through gossip about how she's been involved with other American soldiers, usually trying to get them to marry her.
The film stars Wendell Corey who after starring roles opposite Crawford and Stanwyck slipped back to more appropriate character parts, here the oldest of the three and the most pragmatic, supportive but concerned about the others. He's not afraid of reading the others the filth when he needs to. Rooney's big scene is a scene where he organizes a card game, speedily delivering his dialog as if he's been on uppers for years. A little bit of him goes along way in parts like this. The fact that bombs are going off around him doesn't seem to bother him in the least.
It isn't until three quarters through the film that it deals with anything concerning the war, having mainly focused on personal conflicts up to that point. The dreary black and white photography isn't vivid in dramatizing the action, and it looks like dozens of other B war movies made around the same time. Maurey seems sincere in her scenes with Taylor, perhaps just extremely desperate to grab onto someone to get out of harms way, and I never believed that she fell in love with Taylor, who's rather a buttermilk drinking hypocrite, at first sight. Sadly not the classic I expected it to be, but for what it is, a decent but not exceptional film.
The film stars Wendell Corey who after starring roles opposite Crawford and Stanwyck slipped back to more appropriate character parts, here the oldest of the three and the most pragmatic, supportive but concerned about the others. He's not afraid of reading the others the filth when he needs to. Rooney's big scene is a scene where he organizes a card game, speedily delivering his dialog as if he's been on uppers for years. A little bit of him goes along way in parts like this. The fact that bombs are going off around him doesn't seem to bother him in the least.
It isn't until three quarters through the film that it deals with anything concerning the war, having mainly focused on personal conflicts up to that point. The dreary black and white photography isn't vivid in dramatizing the action, and it looks like dozens of other B war movies made around the same time. Maurey seems sincere in her scenes with Taylor, perhaps just extremely desperate to grab onto someone to get out of harms way, and I never believed that she fell in love with Taylor, who's rather a buttermilk drinking hypocrite, at first sight. Sadly not the classic I expected it to be, but for what it is, a decent but not exceptional film.