I think Fox might've wanted to make the film in part to use Mansfield. She doesn't have the female lead but it's a showy support turn as a comic blonde - Judy Holliday played it on Broadway (with Richard Widmark in the lead). Female lead goes to model Suzy Parker who isn't bad - beautiful and stylish. She's not great but she's not the problem. It's that the male leads are too old. I think Grant was like 30 years older than her. (I get the impression Parker was cast under the "we need a new Audrey Hepburn" grounds.) This needed some of Fox's younger brigade like, I don't know, Pat Boone and Stuart Whitman.
Scenes that are kind of done well like an angry Grant telling off a shipbuilding manufacturer who wants Grant to give speeches while Grant has PTSD don't fully work because Grant is so, well, old. Having said that I enjoyed the serious aspects of the film - Grant has malaria, dislikes war profiteers, meets a former colleague who is in a wheelchair and is dying, the team hears their old ship sunk and most of their comrades are dead. Also Mansfield propositions Ray Walston despite knowing he's married (he doesn't do it because he loves his wife and she just doesn't care).. and I think they do sleep together (she kisses him and he doesn't say no). And Parker and Grant seem to sleep together. This is effective. It just all feels like a film made too late (maybe it would've worked during the Korean War) with a cast too old.
Mansfield over acts at time. She does that silly squealing laugh that I think she was trying to make her trademark. That worked in her Tashlin movies which were cartoons but this needed to be more grounded and her performance has not adjusted accordingly.
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