Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

ma-cortes During WW2, the American O.S.S. mounts covert operations , led by Captain Tom Reynolds (Frank Sinatra) commanding a handful of skilled O.S.S. operatives against the Japanese army in the jungles of Burma . But jungle combat is more grueling than Reynolds had reckoned . As the military commander and his outnumbered troops overcome incredible odds against the Japanese . As sharp-witted soldiers accompany him , such as : Sergeant Jim Norby (Dean Jones) , Capt. Danny De Mortimer (Richard Johnson) , Sgt. John Danforth (Charles Bronson) , Bill Ringa (Steve McQueen) and Doctor Capt. Grey Travis (Peter Lawford). Some respite is found in the arms of gorgeous Carla (Gina Lollobrigida) , an Italian woman protected by a veteran war supplier (Paul Henreid) . But after Chinese rebels offering illegal cross-border support , as they pass the frontier to loot and kill American soldiers ,as Reynolds abandons all notions of "military protocol" and seeks vendetta ; weighting Tom's impulsive requital , attacking against the formalities of the international diplomacy .There's a lot of everything in this Sturges' wartime drama about Burmese war , such as : noisy action , romance , serious political talk , spectacular battles , luxurious scenarios , and wonderful Gina . This movie is based on the real-life story of World War II's OSS Detachment 101 and adapted from the novel by Tom T. Chameles ; but including a lot of focus on a silly love story . This was an OSS Operations Group designed to specialize in activities in the China-Burma-India region in collaboration with the Kachin Rangers , guerrillas and other Allied special operations units and particularly against a Japanese army as familiar with the terrain as the Kachin . The flick has a stolid script by Millard Kaufman , but not uninteresting , and results to be slow-moving , overlong and a little bit dull . However , the war battles , explosions and shootouts make strong impression . Too much romance bogs down this warfare yarn , although the action and intrigue are nice . The film loses impetus when it lingers over the Sinatra's romance with Lollo . Elsewhere, it is indicative of Cold War tensions that attention turns in the hard confrontation between American and Chinese troops . The picture proved once and for all that Frank could be a fine actor . He plays as Captain Tom Reynolds who is in WWII Burma to train the Kachin natives in modern warfare . Regular acting by Gina as the mistress of oily profileer played by Paul Henreid . There are excellent acting from some Hollywood's best players , including prestigious secondaries . Very good support cast as Dean Jones , John Hoyt , Whit Bissell , Richard Johnson , Brian Donlevy . And a lot of oriental actors to have an acceptable future Hollywood career as James Hong , George Takei and Mako's brief role as a soldier in the hospital , it was the first film role for Mako . And Aki Aleong who still goes on playing and producing ; in fact , he has played/financed the last Jean Claude Van Damme : ¨Pound and Flesh¨. It helped advance the youngster Steve McQueen career who exudes star potential , even though he was the late replacement when Sinatra fell out with Sammy Davis Jr ; as a feud had broken out between them . The following year Steve was one of ¨the Magnificent seven¨ and also played ¨The great escape¨ by Sturges .Colorful cinematography in Cinemascope and Technicolor by William H. Daniels , usual cameraman to Greta Garbo . Thrilling as well as atmospheric musical score by Hugo Friedhofer . The motion picture was regularly directed by John Sturges . This one , though , is pretty slack stuff by John Sturges' standards . Sturges was an expert on Western genre as proved in ¨ Escape from Fort Bravo , The law and Jake Wade , The last train of Gun Hill, The Magnificent seven , Backlash , Hour of gun , Bad Day at Black Rock , Joe Kidd , The Hallelujah trail , 3 Sergeants , Valdez or Chino¨ and many others . rating : passable , worthwhile watching .

st-shot Frank Sinatra looks like an outdoors department store mannequin most of the time and the usually reliable action director John Sturgis (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape) is at a loss to get things moving in this World War Two drama that claims to have been shot in Burma and Thailand (exposition shots perhaps) but is dominated by exterior scenes shot on indoor stages.Sinatra is Captain Tom Reynolds commander of an elite force sent to Burma to train and support locals against the Japanese. He's there to get a job done by any means possible and his methods causes rifts within the unit as he bends the rules. In between helping liberate the Burmese people and committing atrocities he spends his r&r in clinches with English challenged, futuristic looking Gina Lollibridgida.Sturgis is hard pressed from the outset to build suspense and urgency into his film with Sinatra's casual acting style in the pivotal role. He's all Vegas cool and insolence and it's a bad fit to lead the likes of characters played by real rough and tumbles Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson who shine amid a lack lustre cast. It's a passionless performance (even in his clinches with Gina) as he downs a fair amount of scotch and sleepwalks through his role.Sturgis for his part has a hard time trimming and putting scenes together to give the film any life or power. The dialog is cliché ridden and the acting flat most of the time which Sturgis attempts to remedy by punctuating with action and sneak attacks that are themselves poorly staged and edited.Legendary B&W cinematographer William Daniels never did grasp color in the same way and he glaringly displays it here with distracting compositions that look artificial and lit like football stadiums. Hugo Friedhofer's score attempts to convey the gravity of the situation but instead heightens the overall mawkishness.In similar more successful treatments you have Errol Flynn's inspirational leadership in Warner's suspenseful Objective Burma before and Lee Marvin's tough, no nonsense commander in The Dirty Dozen following raising the question is Never So Few worth a watch? The first word of the title says it all.

zardoz-13 Frank Sinatra does his best Errol Flynn imitation in director John Sturges' "Never So Few," an uneven blend of romance and combat set against the exotic backdrop of the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II. Sinatra sports a goatee and wears his campaign hat with one side of the brim pinned back Australian style. Twenty minutes he shaves the goatee off and hangs onto the hat. When Sturges and scenarist Millard Kaufmann, who collaborated on "Bad Day at Black Rock," aren't shoe-horning into the narrative an unconvincing and superfluous romance between Italian beauty Gina Lollobrigida and Sinatra, they tackle the racial intolerance. The callous U.S. Army authorities display intolerance toward the Kachin resistance warriors, even some of Sinatra's own men in his unit show their prejudice. The Air Force keeps dropping medical supplies in without enough chutes so the morphine supplies shatter on impact, and the Allied hospitals feed these tribes people food calculated to cause dysentery rather than stimulate their healing."Never So Few" is unquestionably too ambitious for its own good. Sturges and Kaufmann have our war-weary protagonist, Captain Tom Reynolds (Frank Sinatra of "From Here to Eternity"), perform a mercy killing on one of his Kachin infantrymen despite his colleagues' protests. You see, Reynolds' outfit lacks adequate medical supplies to prevent the fatally wounded soldier's needless suffering. When Reynolds proposes to put the Kachin out of his misery, second-in-command Captain Danny De Mortimer (Richard Johnson of "Deadlier Than the Male") objects. "You can't kill a man without murdering a part of yourself." Reynolds dismisses Danny's objection because he has killed a dozen men already in their last battle with the Japanese. As you can see from the outset, "Never So Few" doesn't want to be considered another exercise in hollow wartime heroics.Reynolds and Danny fly back to base and Colonel Parkson (Robert Bray of TV's "Lassie") has a jeep and driver, Corporal Ringa (Steve McQueen of "The Great St. Louis Robbery'), placed at their disposal. During an interlude in a nightclub, Reynolds decks Danny to prove Danny's claim that not even a blow can knock the monocle out of his eye. As both Reynolds and Danny sprawl onto the floor, Carla Vesari (bosomy Gina Lollobrigida of "Solomon and Sheba") enters the nightclub with her wealthy boyfriend Nikko Reggas (Paul Henreid of "Casablanca") and notice the two soldiers on the floor. Talk about an introduction! Carla and Reynolds wind up dancing arm-in-arm briefly and she decides that Reynolds isn't her type. Inevitably, these two diametrically opposite persons are attracted to each other. Reynolds has a difficult time convincing Carla to reciprocate his sentiments. She is attached to Reggas who provides for her every wish and comfort. Meanwhile, Corporal Ringa raises a little of his own hell. He decks two military policemen about the time that Reynolds and Danny are leaving the nightclub. Reynolds decides that Ringa must join his outfit and he convinces Colonel Parkson to reassign him.Furthermore, Reynolds demands that Parkson assign a doctor to his unit. Reynolds has been acting as the chief surgeon. Parkson orders Reynolds and Danny to take two weeks off. Initially, Reynolds objects, but they wind up spending time with Reggas and Carla. Danny comes down with cerebral malaria and the Army doctor, Captain Grey Travis (Peter Lawford) shows up. Reynolds has Travis assigned to his unit. Danny recovers and they return to the jungle to fight the Japanese. Reynolds is ninety-nine per cent sure that Carla has deep sixed him.As it turns out, Reggas is working for Military Intelligence. It doesn't help matters that the Henreid character vanishes without any notice. Later, after a big battle scene, when they destroy an enemy airfield, Captain Reynolds and his men cross over into China and wipe out the renegade Chinese mercenaries authorized by the Chungking government to kill all invaders both foreign and domestic, including American servicemen. Reynolds has a showdown with the brass over this incident. They want to court-martial him, but he presents evidence of Chinese treachery.If this plot summary doesn't whet your appetite, you should know that future superstars Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson flesh out of the cast. "New So Few" ranked as McQueen's first major movie, while Bronson turns in another solid supporting performance as Lieutenant Danforth, a Navajo Indian radio translator, long before John Woo made "Windtalkers" about the Navajo contribution to World War II. The cast is padded with lots of familiar Hollywood actors, including Robert Bray, John Hoyt, Dean Jones, George Takei, Mako, James Hong, Brian Donlevy, and Whit Bissell.Basically, the action alternates between the jungle and behind Allied lines as our heroes take the time to chill out, get drunk, fight, and upset their superiors. The same can be said about the production. Some scenes were lensed on location while others take place on an MGM soundstage. "Never So Few" is one of Sinatra's early forays into an all-action white-knuckler and ole blue eyes wields a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun and a British Sten gun. McQueen survives the fray, but Bronson bites the bullet. Sturges and Kaufmann depict World War II as "an unprecedented war. Sturges stages the battle scenes with his usual aplomb and the widescreen Panavision lens of cinematographer William H. Daniels, who lensed "Brute Force" and "The Naked City," add to the spectacle.Essentially, "Never So Few" opens with a controversial bang when Sinatra ices one of his own troops and ends with a bang when the Allies reprimand the Nationalist Chinese for letting their warlords indiscriminately murder American G.I.s! "Never So Few" qualifies one of those rare movies about the warfare in Asia with "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Objective, Burma" as the other two major films. Incidentally, a modicum of the action is based loosely on a true story.

AntiSpielbergForce Now, when I sit down to watch a war movie, I expect a bare minimum of glorious carnage. Sadly, none of the ingredients of a fun-filled afternoon - mountains of mutilated corpses, napalm rain lighting up screaming peasants, flak guns tearing through the flesh of the unworthy, crania grinding underneath triumphant Panzer tracks - are present in this so called "war movie".Seriously, where IS the war? There are some partisans and Japanese soldiers shooting at each other a couple of times, and a few grounded planes blowing up during a raid. That's about it. The little combat there is, is of such low intensity or urgency that it makes the opening blurb (about the heroes in Burma saving democracy from untold numbers of evil imperialist minions) look a little confusing, to say the least. Indeed, this movie never misses an opportunity to leave the scene of action for a trip into town. As soon as a modicum of martial tension is built up, Sturges instead chooses to wind down completely.After a brief opening scuffle with the Japanese, Captain Sinatra and his second leave for city HQ to request a doctor, or whatever. They go to a nightclub, where Frankie boy falls in love with the trophy companion of a local bigshot. She does not seem impressed at first, but we, of course, KNOW that she will not be able to resist the charm of Ol' Blue Eyes. After completing their phoney, bogus, bastard excuse for a "mission", the two soldiers - still in the city - receive two weeks leave out of the blue, which Sinatra of course spends on sweeping the young lady off her feet. When they finally get back to the jungle, an hour of the movie has already transpired. Frankie is immediately wounded, which means back to the city for more sweet lovin'. And it goes on like this.Even as a romance, the movie is a complete joke. Not only is there zero chemistry between the lovers, the concept of Lollobrigida's rich "owner" being the jealous type - which is strongly hinted at - is also completely disregarded. This would probably have moved the movie even further away from its front as a "war movie", but really, it had already abandoned the pretense of being a war movie long before that potential idea could be explored. During the first half of the romance, the lovers exchange snide remarks ("Go back to the jungle, soldier boy!", "You're just a piece of furniture!", etc.), whereas the second half consists of the two sitting around talking about how many children they will have. Excuse me while I look away.The flick transforms into courtroom drama towards the end, which is also the only remotely interesting plot-detour in the entire movie, but it comes too late to make any difference. Apparently, Sturges remembered that Sinatra was supposed to save democracy as well as looking good in a suit, so Frankie goes defying some international law. He is indicted, but since his actions exposed the forces of evil, he is cleared of all charges and democracy wins. Hooray.I respect Sinatra as an artist, but I have yet to see him make an impact as an actor. He seems to lack the gravitas for the "officer" part of his character here, and comes off as arrogant most of the time. Bronson and McQueen shine in their supporting roles, but are not on screen long enough to save this mess, and Lollobrigida is almost as pathetic an actress as Sophia Loren (who also tumorously thrived on roles like this).Don't bother.