How to Lead a Guerrilla War in the Deep Jungle and Still Have an Active Social Life
Never So Few is a 1959 film, directed by John Sturges (The Great Escape, The Eagle Has Landed) and starring Frank Sinatra (Von Ryan’s Express, Kings Go Forth). It is Sturges’ worst World War II movie and pretty squarely in the middle of the pack for Sinatra’s WWII films.
I’m kind of angry about this movie because it really could be one of my favorites, but it isn’t. I’m not even sure you should watch it.
Okay, it’s not that bad. It’s based on the novel by Tom T. Chamales, who was one of Merrill’s Marauders and fought in Burma with the OSS’s Detachment 101. He also may have been a pimp after the war. The war movie plot, which I assume is the crux of the novel, is really strong. Sinatra, attached to the OSS, leads a small band of guerilla fighters in a politically and militarily tricky situation. There are interesting and powerful scenes where Sinatra’s character faces real struggles and makes real moral choices.
But, and this may be the biggest ‘but’ I’ve ever written, the combat sequences are generally rote and poorly staged, and the romance plot requires him to constantly fly out of the combat zone to harass a women (Gina Lollobrigida, The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell, Achtung! Banditi!) who has literally said “Please, stop sniffing around me like an animal,” and “Hell, no,” when he asked if he can see her again. But she doesn’t mean it, and he’s Frank Sinatra, so . . . love.
Sinatra is far too wholesome and mid western to watch a woman bathe
Sinatra constantly chases after the woman, but when she invites him into a room where she is bathing, he becomes uncomfortable because she has the sexual power, which he’s unable to accept. Lollobrigida is smart, sophisticated, sexy and confident, and Sinatra’s character wants to turn her into a housewife, even saying that he’s “gonna’ keep you barefoot and pregnant and on the edge of town. We’re gonna’ be married. I’ll be back. Learn to cook.” Learn to cook? She’s lives with a rich and powerful man in a villa; they have servants. Learn to cook?
He finally kisses her–despite her protests–and she relents because he’s just that good at kissing, and dames like a man who takes charge, or something like that.
This extremely dated (that’s the nicest way I can say “misogynistic”) courtship model, however uncomfortable one might find it—and I’m not sure how one can’t, is also a weird distraction. “We’re fighting a losing battle against forty times our numbers, so let’s take two weeks off at a luxuriously appointed villa and relentlessly hit on our host’s girlfriend.” Hey guys, there’s a war on; maybe you should focus on that.
A lesser problem is that much of the combat is not realistic or particularly interesting. Some guys are standing or kneeling or perhaps laying down in one place and shooting, then we show some other guys standing or laying down or perhaps kneeling and shooting and/or being shot at before we cut to some other group either shooting or being shot at, and these angles may only be related by being part of the same battle. There’s rarely a sense of tactics or geography, or that combatants are necessarily in the same zip code. “We’ll film Sinatra and McQueen firing on Tuesday and film the Japanese soldiers on Frank’s day off or something. As long as everyone’s firing some sort of machine gun, it’ll be fine.” Some parts are stronger, but much of the action is just lazy.
This film has a few things going for it, like Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen is good at acting. Maybe he isn’t, but I always like and root for his characters even though they are exponentially cooler than me. And he does small things well. The way he sits in a Jeep and drinks a Coke with a little something added is cool and assured yet genuine.
McQueen’s Thompson has the butt stock removed and has two clips taped together (a move he doubles down on in Hell Is for Heroes); he wears a Bill Belichick style sleeveless sweatshirt (He wears a similar shirt in The Great Escape—maybe Bill Belichick is performing some sort of Steve McQueen homage.) and has a Luger—which I’m sure were all over Burma—in his shoulder holster. He does the same sort of weapons as fashion accessory thing that I damn Brad Pitt for in Fury, but here I’m, like, “Steve McQueen rules.”
His costuming is overdone, as it is in general in this movie. All the stars are dressed differently, so we can tell them apart. How do we know Richard Johnson (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) isn’t Frank Sinatra? He’s wearing a monocle. In fact, Sinatra has a chin beard for one or two scenes until someone thought better. Sinatra also has a weapons caddie. One Chindit follows him around with extra guns, depending on range and where the enemy lies, I assume.
Sinatra loses his weapon caddie and his Maynard G. Krebs chin beard early in the movie.
While everyone is in the jungle the story is as strong as any World War II movie and better than most. Sinatra’s character puts a dying wounded man out of his misery early in the film, and the staging and dialogue for that scene are really strong; later in the film he tells a number of superior officers to go to Hell and the dialogue and delivery in that scene are really stirring. But we had to wade through Sinatra and Lollobrigida wandering around sightseeing (and there are some very good-looking locations featured though it turns out Frank wasn’t on location because the location was not Las Vegas) and talking about their future home in the suburbs.
Seriously, he’s in the deep jungle, and they don’t even have a doctor, but he just flies out to spend weekends at a rich man’s (Paul Henried, Casablanca) villa to hit on his girlfriend. In this way it is nearly the opposite to Merrill’s Marauders or Objective, Burma! where soldiers are trapped by the deep jungle, battling disease and starvation–not attending cocktail parties. When this film is a war movie and not a romance it stands shoulder to shoulder with those films and may be better–but it is all too frequently a romance.
Recommendation
Objective Burma! and Merrill’s Marauders are in many ways better movies and Sinatra is better in From Here to Eternity. He doesn’t perform better in Von Ryan’s Express, but that’s also a better movie–but Never so Few is not bad; I just wish it were better. I haven’t read the novel, but I kind of want to.