'WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY?'........FROM THE 'WAR IS GOOD CLEAN FUN' DEPT.......

What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966)  belonged to a rapidly dying genre.....the military comedy. By that we mean a comedy that fundamentally respected our armed forces and American values.......but could still gently poke fun at all the foibles of men and women in uniform.....

             That kind of film (and TV shows like the un-missed "Hogan's Heroes") would head for the tar pits as the country began to brutally splinter over the war in Vietnam. By the late 60's and early 70's, military comedies became fully weaponized missiles of withering anti-war satire...("M.A.S.H.", "Catch 22")

             And you could kiss goodbye movies like "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?" with their lovable cast of familiar types.....the blustering brass, the gruff master sergeant. the wily conniving junior officer (usually the leading man of these films), the happily wine guzzling Italians who didn't really like Mussolini and of course, the overwhelmingly stupid, buffoonish Germans.

              Director Blake Edwards still managed to pull off a fairly lavish canvas here, with a large cast and huge comedic set pieces with teeming extras.......even though a year earlier, his grand, epic spoof of old movie adventures, "The Great Race" crashed and burned at the box office. With a script by William Peter Blatty (yes, you read it right, the guy who wrote "The Exorcist"), Edwards pressed on with this involved, convoluted World War II farce about an American company of GI's  attempting to seize and subdue an Italian village.

              The Italians agree to surrender to our boys (a straight-arrow martinet played by the wild take-no-prisoner comic Dick Shawn and his sardonic lieutenant played by James Coburn)......but only if they can party in an all night festival that makes New Years Eve in Times Square look skimpy. We won't even attempt to describe the avalanche of complications that result after an U.S. Army Intelligence officer (Harry Morgan) arrives in town the morning after this confetti-strewn bacchanal.

              A word about Blatty:  before he scared the hell out of everyone with "The Exorcist", he enjoyed a brief but busy career as a comedy screenwriter......a truly odd calling for Blatty since he couldn't write a funny line even if the power of Christ compelled him.  His so-called comedies usually concocted absurd situations, leaving the actors adrift, desperately hamming it up to squeeze out any laughs.....(you almost wept in sympathy for the actors stuck in 1965's "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home", Blatty's most catastrophic attempt at writing a farce...)

            His script for this film piles up enough comedic complications on the beleaguered American soldiers and the comic opera Italian villagers to fill up three or four movies.....which is why the film drags on for close to two hours. For his Act III, Blatty throws the Germans into the mix and the movie quickly spirals downward in a dreary hide-and-seek, cat-and-mouse game between our troops, their new found Italian buddies and the dopey Germans....(headed by professional tubby movie villain Leon Askin, also one of the "Hogan's Heroes" cartoon Nazis..)

            There are, in fact, a few pleasures to take in here......mostly coming from Blake Edwards studious devotion to the art of physical comedy. As anyone could see from his Peter Sellers "Pink Panther" films, Edwards adored slapstick and no other director spent so much time and effort designing strenuous gags that sent his actors tumbling off balconies, stairs or into each other.

            The premier set piece comes about halfway through....the elaborate staging of a mock battle between the Americans and Italians for the benefit of Army reconnaissance aircraft observers. Edwards has some real fun at the expense of previous World War II movies....as Coburn tries to orchestrate the battle like a harried movie director and soldiers from both sides fake grandly melodramatic death scenes to the enthusiastic cheers of the village whores.

         . From that point on, Edward and Blatty randomly heap on more subplots, with only a few of them sporadically funny......two hapless bank robbers forever tunneling under the wrong floor, a coterie of village communists hoping to kidnap the German general, Harry Morgan going bonkers while lost in the catacombs beneath the village and  Dick Shawn in drag, looking worse than Robert Preston in "Victor Victoria" and pursued by a horny German officer.  (By that time, we started looking at our watch.....)

            A mixed 1960's bag,,,,,,but so very typical of Blake Edwards, whose comedic instincts could veer from spot-on classic belly laughs to excruciatingly awful,moments (even dedicated movie buffs can barely bring themselves to remember his inclusion of Mickey Rooney's Japanese caricature in "Breakfast At Tiffany's").   For his farewell to old-fashioned Army comedy, "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?", we'll stand at attention for only 2 salutes (**) and that's mainly for the make-believe battle......as for screenwriter William Peter Blatty......he probably generated more laughter with the sight of Linda Blair's head doing a 360 spin........