Whatever this movie's origins, it has Lee Marvin. What an actor. He brings something unexpected to every role, almost to every scene.
Here he is in a military prison in Korea. He's just been condemned to death as a traitor. His wife, Vera Miles, has flown six thousand miles to visit him in his cell. He loves her desperately. And how does he show it? He walks up to her, puts his nose against hers for a moment or two, and then quickly ENGULFS her in these long enwinding arms. A brief declaration of need, and he spins away from her abruptly and gets back to his case. The whole scene takes about one minute, and Marvin shows he can do a toe dance around anyone else in the film if the material allowed him to. In boot camp we were shown a training film illustrating the mechanics of courts martial. Lee Marvin, before he was famous, played a sailor who lies on the stand. He nailed the shifty tell perfectly.
Not that the other performers are slouchers. They're all seasoned professionals. Vera Miles is pretty and her questions carry an English inflection. The terminal contours drop instead of rising in pitch. I don't mean that to seem complicated. If you hear her ask a question you'll know what I'm getting at. She's very appealing. Peter Graves is tall and sonorous. Murray Hamilton is always a treat, even when he's shallow and leering, as he is here. He's given one of the better lines, roughly: "Imagine how Don Quixote would have felt if the windmills tilted back." Much of the movie depends on Bradford Dillman who gives the role everything he has, but he doesn't bring much to the party. I don't know why. His lines here sound as if they're being recited in an acting class, but he was chillingly good as the homosexual child murderer in "Compulsion". The dependable and always likable Lloyd Nolan is the commanding general.
Despite the difference in their ages, both Nolan and Dillman were born in San Francisco, attended prep schools, and went to exclusive universities -- Stanford and Yale respectively. (I wonder if they ever discussed the city; might they both have had dinner at Jack's Restaurant, as Sam Spade did?) Dillman and Marvin were both in the Marine Corps; Dillman narrowly missed the Korean war and Marvin had part of his buttocks shot off in the Pacific. I wish someone would stop me from carrying on with these irrelevancies.
The script, lamentably, doesn't match the cast. It's hurried and confused. Fifteen minutes into the movie and Marvin is given an angry speech about (somehow) being set up by a dead officer or something. It's reaches the audience as gibberish because there has been no forewarning. We don't know what he's talking about. A guess is that the editing is so screwed up because this was cobbled together from a two-part TV movie. What's left certainly looks like a TV movie. There are few sets, the lighting is flat, and the dialog could have come from "The Twilight Zone" or "Combat" or "Gunsmoke." The musical score also smacks of TV.
Buzz Kulik is an efficient and uninspired director. He was my director on the art house classic, "Too Young the Hero." Despite his inadequacies I managed to give a compelling performance as a drunken hobo, the result of long practice. In this film he allows or encourages almost everyone to overact. "How DARE you bring your ASSUMPTIONS into my COURTROOM!" Something like that.
The plot is full of holes, some no doubt due to clumsy editing, but the fact is that the climax lacks logic. Dillman exposes a security leak that has nothing to do with the case against Marvin -- and it gets Marvin off. Problems should always be solved for the rest of us as easily as they are for Lee Marvin in this turbid drama.
