One of a series of films Alan Ladd for his own company at Jaguar, all of them second-tier action dramas reusing many of the same crew such as writer Martin Rackin and DOP John Seitz. This one has an intriguing premise, being about a Quaker called up in WW2.
For an action film, there is quite a long section at the beginning where Ladd romances his Madison Avenue boss (Diane Foster) – his Long Island beach house is identical to the one Michael Mancini lived in Melrose Place. This goes on for a while and is quite interesting, some strong dialogue, but you can’t help wondering “why is this in the film, especially at the beginning? Isn’t this about a Quaker?” Then it switches into war mode with cliches to match – horny sailors, wise captain, ambitious executive officer, calm doctor.
It’s wonderful to watch Ladd in scenes with his old costar William Bendix (you can see how they got along from the film, Bendix blathers away while Ladd listens, enjoying the other man’s liveliness.) The Quaker stuff is weirdly dealt with – Keenan Wynn is a bigot towards Ladd’s Quaker upbringing, Ladd denies he lives by Quaker rules, but then when a plane attacks he can’t give the order to fire (something that turns out to be correct luckily – but clearly even if he was wrong he wouldn’t have fired; Ladd’s face was lined and alcohol ravaged by this stage, giving extra dimension to his agony). The crew don’t like Ladd – but then he proves his bravery disposing of a bomb. OK, right so you’d think that’s the end of the film – but then there’s a scene where Ladd gets in a fist fight in an Alaskan port, then leads a mission to the Aleutian Islands, suffers “I can’t kill impotence” again – but recovers to mow down some Japanese. Hooray!
Ladd films often dealt with a man overcoming pesky pacifist principals and learn how to kill – Thunder in the East and Shane are two examples. They drop the Wynn-mean-to-Ladd plot then Wynn turns out to be a morphine addict.
As you might gather, the film feels like a television series with the storylines of various episodes all thrown in – one about Ladd romancing his boss, his boss leaving her previous fiancée, bigotry from Wynn, Wynn’s addiction, Ladd being brave, Ladd learning to punch people, Ladd learning to kill. Potentially a lot stronger film if they’d just sorted it out. Ladd was looking his age, and he isn’t the most expressive actor in the world, but he tries.
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