Soldier In The Rain (1963) Maybe it's fitting this film arrived right after JFK's assassination, which ripped apart America's last vestiges of innocence and optimism......
The movie already looked like something from a bygone era......technically it categorized itself as a service comedy, that worn out genre that poked gentle fun at life in the armed forces.....
Service comedies usually involved the loony machinations of some fast-talking, double dealing skirt chasing enlisted man..........whose schemes and capers bamboozle and confound his mostly dopey superior officers.
'Soldier In The Rain' promises such a movie, but delivers something else altogether.......an ultimately melancholic meditation on the nature of enduring friendship, and the price paid for quietly living a life of restraint and grace.
We didn't give a damn that the film's almost completely devoid of typical service comedy hijinks.......
It provided something even better.........the coming together of the oddest, most disparate trio of actors who ever found themselves together in the same movie.....
Gem # 1: The King Of Cool himself, Steve McQueen, only this time, throwing off his tightly controlled persona to indulge in an exuberant bout of Jerry Lewis style clowning. He's a sight to see and it takes some getting used to..........playing a live wire supply sargent with wild entrepreneurial dreams as he's about to leave the Army.
Gem # 2: The self designated 'Great One' himself, Jackie Gleason, playing McQueen's calm, gentle-hearted mentor, a weary, worldly wise Master Sargent whom McQueen hopes to recruit as his post-military partner in his myriad get-rich-quick schemes....... Gleason's quietly, brilliantly funny as he deftly underplays his scenes with McQueen, who's fairly bouncing off the walls like an ADD-afflicted toddler.......
Gem # 3: The one and only Jailbait Princess the reigning trailer-trash Lolita of 1960's cinema, Tuesday Weld.......at the very top of her game playing her signature character, the impossibly sexy teen with a truckload of quirks and insecurities. Achingly adorable yet somehow dangerous to know. Weld perfected this role like no other actress and in a stroke of perverse genius, the film pairs her off in an unlikely date with.......Jackie Gleason. This oddest of odd couples play off against one another with a poignancy that lifts the film far above its own modest intentions.....
The film's ramshackle storyline barely holds together, either as a comedy or drama, but the three lead actors make the very most of their individual scenes together which makes the whole thing entirely watchable, wobbly as it is.
Ignoring its underpinnings as a 'service comedy', the film's final bittersweet finale comes from the aftermath of a startling, extraordinary bloody brawl that pits McQueen and Gleason against the film's villains, two bullying MPs. (This sequence ranks right up there with Frank Sinatra's kung fu battle with Henry Silva in "The Manchurian Candidate")
We can't make any great claims about "Soldier In The Rain" as a movie......but you'll never see a triple-play of actors like the three in this film........and for us, that makes it a 4 star (****) 'must see'.......so BQ says see it.
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