THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY (1964)

Interesting black comedy in which both main stars (James Garner and Julie Andrews) play against type; they do a fine job, but that might be one reason why the movie wasn't a big hit in its day. Another reason is that its anti-war tone (more on that later) may have been out of place in a mainstream movie in '64. Had it been made just three or four years later, the public reaction might have been different. Set just before D-Day in England, the movie stars Garner as an American naval officer and admitted coward who has gotten a snug assignment as a "dog-robber"; basically, as an aide to an admiral, his main job is to make his boss's life run smoothly, both on- and off-duty. This primarily means procuring food and drink (and women) for social function--and while he's at it, getting women for his fellow officers as well. Julie Andrews is a British war widow who is called on to serve as his driver. Garner's glad-handing ways don't work too well with her; the first time he gives her a little flirtatious smack on the bum, she smacks him in the face. But soon he gets serious about her and she finds herself returning the romantic interest. As someone who has lost several family members to war, she warms to this man whom she knows will do everything in his power *not* to be a hero. Garner's boss, Melvyn Douglas, a recent widower himself and in the throes of a long, slow mental breakdown, proposes that a special camera crew be sent along on the D-Day invasion on a public relations mission: to capture on film the first Navy man to die in the battle. It has to be a Navy man so that the role of the Navy doesn't get diminished in the post-war shakeout. No one takes the admiral's suggestion too seriously, but the project rolls along on its own steam until Garner, despite his best-laid plans, does in fact wind up the first sailor on Omaha Beach. True to his cowardly nature, he tries to run back toward the ship, but his gung-ho buddy, James Coburn, shoots at him and forces him back to the beach where it appears that he is indeed killed by enemy fire. Just as the planned PR campaign gets going (with a blurry picture of the running Garner on the covers of all the news magazines), Garner turns up alive at a hospital. He decides to expose Douglas' crazy motives, but Andrews talks him into taking a different way out, one that gives their relationship a happy ending, but is also cynical about the issues of war and glory that have been raised.

Much of the film feels like a slightly more realistic version of DR. STRANGELOVE (the crazy officer, the moral confusion about war), but the romantic elements soften the story's bite. Still, I think it was quite brave to set a movie which questions the valor of war during the one modern war that everyone seems to agree was The Good War. Theoretically, the movie's satire isn't aimed at feeding anti-war sentiments; as Garner and Andrews point out more than once, yes, war is sometimes necessary, but we should quit holding it up as valorous and noble. The screenplay, by renowned writer Paddy Chayefsky (who also wrote the wonderfully bitter and prescient NETWORK), is quite talky but generally effective, particularly one scene in which Garner, in the service of truth-telling, destroys the illusions of Andrew's "dotty" mother, played wonderfully by Joyce Grenfall, who herself has been damaged by the valorization of war. Also with Keenan Wynn and Steve Franken (as two drunken sailors who wind up being Garner's camera crew), William Windom, Douglas Henderson, Liz Fraser, and Judy Carne as one of Coburn's one-night stands. Coburn overplays his part, but most everything else about this movie is just right. [DVD]