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As a matter of fact, for the first reel or two, the ludicrous unreality of the film is a considerable advantage. The moviegoer is driven to wonder how a movie could possibly be that funny unless it was intended as a satire on what the scriptwriter assumes to be the unconscious assumptions of the moviegoing public, e.g., small towns are places in which respected people lead secret lives of shocking depravity, rich men are usually stuffed shirts, a man who cannot hold his liquor is less than a man, the boss usually sleeps with his secretary, teachers are frigid, prostitutes have hearts of gold, bars are interesting places, there is honor among thieves, culture is for the birds, Hemingway and Faulkner are the greatest writers who ever lived.
Yet as bromide follows bromide, the spectator slowly comes to a drugged realization that the script is not making fun of anybody's beliefs, but simply stating its own. After that, there is nothing to hang around for except occasional flickers of brilliant overacting by Shirley MacLaine, the chance to watch Frank Sinatra play Frank Sinatra, and the spectacle of Director Vincente Minnelli's talents dissolving in the general mess of the story, like sunlight in a slag heap.
Rally Round the Flag, Boys! (20th Century-Fox), Max Shulman's comic novel about contemporary Connecticulture, provided thousands of Shulmaniacs with some of the bigger sniggers of 1957. Shulman's writing bubbled like an aging chorus girl. Director Leo (Going My Way) McCarey's picture fizzes like an overheated bottle of pop. But chances are the customers who nuzzled the one will guzzle the other.
Putnam's Landing, the center of disturbance in this minor mirthquake, is a charming little Connecticut town full of $40,000 "mortgage-covered cottages." The hero (Paul Newman), a Manhattan pressagent, staggers home every night in mortal need of love and kisses. And what does he get? He gets the television stare from his two young sons, and the small hello from a wife (Joanne Woodward) who spends more time on committees ("Garbagedisposalwise, new horizons are daily being opened to us") than she does in the sack. And what does he do about it? Nothing the censor could object to, but enough to make the little woman think that he is up to no good with the local Circe (Joan Collins). At this juncture the Army (Jack Carson) arrives in Putnam's Landing, and the film unwisely abandons a rather promising triangle in favor of a much too improbable Pentagon.
Still, there are moments. The script provides at least one memorable line. "Improper?" the Circe murmurs with a shrug when the hero tries to preserve his virtue. "But why? We're both married." Newman sustains a couple of first-rate scenes of slapstick seduction, and Collins is a comic siren with plenty of oogah. And then there is one superb bit of business which Director McCarey had the fine Irish wit to throw away. In the midst of a furious family argument, Actor Newman stomps into the kitchen, grabs a tea bag, slaps it in a mug and, without for an instant interrupting his tirade, rams the mug under the hot-water spigot to make himself what is probably history's most hopelessly masculine cup of tea.