Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Aubrey Hackett While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

grantss Entertaining naval comedy-drama.Lt (jg) Doug Roberts (played by Henry Fonda) is an officer aboard a US Navy supply ship. It is the last few months of World War 2 and the ship is stationed in the Pacific. The ship's captain, Lt Commander Morton (James Cagney), is a hard, mean taskmaster and is universally despised by the crew. Roberts keeps applying to transfer to a fighting ship but the Captain keeps preventing this happening. Meanwhile Ensign Frank Pulver (Jack Lemmon), when not chasing nurses, has some ideas to undermine the captain...Works much better as a comedy than a drama. The military side of things is fairly inaccurate and unrealistic. While directors John Ford and Mervyn Leroy try to make something of the Roberts-Morton feud, the crew's low morale and generally how a captain can bring down a crew, this isn't developed very well. There is very little real tension in the plot.The comedy, however, is pretty good. There are some great slapstick moments and there is a fun tone to the movie. Moreover, Jack Lemmon lights up the screen, and although acting behind the cinematic legends that are Cagney and Fonda, outshines them in this movie. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his efforts.On that note, Cagney and Fonda put in solid performances. However, Fonda was about 30 years older than his character, so was badly miscast.

James Hitchcock The action takes place in 1945, in the "waning days" of World War II. The "Mister Roberts" of the title is Lieutenant Douglas Roberts, cargo officer aboard the United States Navy cargo ship "Reluctant". The ship's work of keeping the Navy supplied is vital to the war effort and Roberts performs his duties conscientiously and well, but he is dissatisfied with life. This is partly due to the fact that he longs to see combat action, which he regards as a more exciting and honourable, if more dangerous, form of service, and the "Reluctant's" work keeps her well away from the actual fighting. It is also, however, partly due to a personality clash between Roberts and the ship's captain, Lieutenant Commander Morton.Roberts is not the only person with whom Morton clashes. Indeed, he seems to have a personality clash not only with Roberts but with the whole of his crew (and probably with most of the human race).He is an unpopular martinet, obsessed with maintaining strict discipline and imposing harsh punishments for minor infractions of the rules. He is also obsessed with trying to promote his own career by sucking up to the top brass; a palm tree presented to him by an Admiral as a reward for his crew's performance plays an important role in the plot. Roberts has made several requests for a transfer to another ship but all have been rejected after Morton refused to endorse them, not because he is desperate to keep Roberts as part of his crew but because he is anxious to do a bad turn to a man he dislikes. Much of Morton's dislike of Roberts is rooted in inverted snobbery; he is of working-class origin, and at one time worked as a waiter, and resents the educated middle classes, to which Roberts belongs, for the condescending way in which they treated him. In some ways, Morton reminded me of Humphrey Bogart's Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny", another film from the mid fifties about a tyrannical wartime naval captain. The main difference is that "The Caine Mutiny" is a serious drama whereas "Mister Roberts" is, generally, a comedy. For most of its length the film is played for laughs with Morton as a figure of fun; the crew flirt with pretty nurses, run riot during a long- delayed shore leave on a Pacific island and spend most of their time trying to do as little work as possible and to get around their hated captain's regulations. One officer, Ensign Pulver, spends most of his time idling in his bunk. Only towards the end does the tone of the film become more serious. Henry Fonda, as Roberts, plays his role competently enough, but I still felt he was miscast. In 1955 he would have been 50 years old, too old for a junior officer, and I felt that the role should have gone to a significantly younger man. The studio (Warner Bros.) apparently would have preferred either William Holden (13 years younger) or Marlon Brando (19 years younger) but were overruled by director John Ford who insisted on Fonda. In the event this proved to be an error on Ford's part as he and Fonda repeatedly clashed on set, even though they had previously worked together on "Fort Apache". Ford also clashed with another of the film's stars, James Cagney. This was to be one of the reasons (health problems were another) why Ford was replaced as director midway through filming by Mervyn LeRoy. (Both men were credited). Jack Lemmon rather surprisingly received the 1955 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Pulver. I say "surprisingly" because, although there is nothing particularly bad about his performance, he was up against a much better one from Sal Mineo in "Rebel without a Cause". William Powell (acting in his last film, although he was to live for another three decades) is good as the kindly ship's doctor, but the best performance comes from Cagney as the bullying Morton, in my view better here than in "Love Me or Leave Me" for which he received an Oscar nomination in the same year. The film itself was nominated for "Best Picture", a nomination which looks odd when one considers that movies as great as "Rebel without a Cause", "East of Eden" and "Bad Day at Black Rock" were overlooked. This strikes me as an example of two potentially good films being incongruously joined together to produce, if not a bad one, then a mediocre one. It would have been quite possible to produce a good comedy about a wartime naval crew's battles against an unpopular captain. It would have been equally possible to produce a serious wartime drama about a naval officer who yearns for a transfer to an active combat role, despite the increased risk to his personal safety. Trying to combine both stories in a single tragi-comedy evidently proved more difficult. Comic relief can be an effective device in a predominantly serious play or film. The trouble with "Mister Roberts" is that it tries to do the opposite, introducing tragic relief into an essentially comic film, and the result is that the final scenes strike a jarring note indeed. 6/10

Ed Steele Having served on an oiler in the mid-60's, this tale of a cargo ship sailing (seemingly) aimlessly in the Pacific during wartime has stuck with me for 50 years. I have long been a fan of both the stage play and the movie because it spoke to my personal time in the service. While the performances are uniformly strong, it is the script that I have always thought was the reason this story still stands up. While those fighting on the front lines are usually the subject of war movies, we frequently forget that there are far more service people working in support that give those at the front the chance to succeed. Having spent time on a support ship myself, I was stunned by how many characters I recognized as members of the crew. With the exception of the Captain, each of these sailors, no matter how small the part, felt like a true reflection of the men I served with. Others may see them as stereotypical, but I do not. The kinship I have felt for the men on The Reluctant continues to be palpable. Based on a book of stories that are, in turn, based on the original author's experiences on such vessels during the war, Mister Roberts continues to fascinate. If there is a theme to be taken away from the overall project it is Mr. Roberts' paean to the crew in a letter he writes. Remember, this is storytelling that allows you to absorb the atmosphere and the nuances of the time and story. Don't expect a lot of action because that is not the part of WWII's story that the film makers are telling. This comedy/drama is firmly cradled in the reality of a time and place only a few of us have gone.

writers_reign As someone remarked here it's not always possible to revisit a film you watched several years ago and extract the same full measure of enjoyment out of it because the alchemy of the years between is inclined to tarnish it but Mr. Roberts for the most part does retain its luminescence so that what you originally rated 10/10 has slipped to perhaps 8 or 9. Much has been made of the fact that John Ford was the original director and this is evident by the likes of Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jnr and Duke Wayne's son, Patrick in supporting roles, all three having strong connections to Ford and while they don't necessarily enhance the film neither do they impair it. It's very much an actor's movie and it's especially rewarding to see three of the finest of the Old Guard - Hank Fonda, Jimmy Cagney and Bill Powell, handing the torch on to the best of the next generation in Jack Lemon. All have - and make the best of - outstanding moments and though difficult to select one out of the four for me Bill Powell just shades it by the tiniest margin. With acting of this calibre it's immaterial who directed what segment and what really matters is what's on screen and now, thankfully, DVD.