Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [26]
FILMING ON Never So Few (the film’s original, much inferior working title was Sacred and Profane) began in March 1959. The movie was based on Tom Chamales’s 1957 novel about the World War II battle that took place in the India-Burma-China theater to keep open the crucial Burma supply trail despite Japan’s all-out offensive to take it over. Most of the fighting was done by Burmese guerrillas, supervised and supported by a small contingent of American troops led by a tough-as-nails captain, Tom C. Reynolds, played by Sinatra.
Throughout, Reynolds, who continually refers to the Japanese and the Chinese as “gooks,” “Nips,” “Japs,” and “lice,” turns into a one-man American militia when, two-thirds of the way through the film, he and his men are ordered to destroy a Japanese airfield near the Chinese border. Although undermanned, they succeed, but on the way back they are attacked by a renegade force of Chinese soldiers opposed to both the Japanese occupation and Chiang Kai-shek’s republic. They support Mao Tse-tung, further complicating the already complicated situation. After wiping out the renegades, Reynolds finds evidence that these same insurgents had killed dozens of American soldiers. Upon his return to headquarters, he is brought before an American general and is personally lauded for his actions by, of all people, Chiang Kai-shek.
In the midst of seemingly out of nowhere comes Carla Vesari (Gina Lollobrigida), kept in splendor by older Eurotrash suavo Nikko Regas (Paul Henreid), wealthy, sophisticated, wise, and ultimately unable to keep her from the lecherous advances of Reynolds. Vesari angrily rebuffs Reynolds for half the movie before letting him see her nude while taking a bubble bath, which turns him into a salivating bulldog, at which point she falls inexplicably and completely in love with him.
From then on, she continually pops up in the most unlikely of places on or near the front lines, almost always in sleeveless nightgowns, for the sole purpose of being near Reynolds. At one point he explains to her that he is a war lover first and foremost and could never live a normal married life. However, after Reynolds is fully pardoned for killing the insurgents by the Chinese government, in the last scene of the film we see him with Carla; they have just been married and she is setting him straight on what their life together is going to be like. She has somehow successfully domesticated him, and, quite bewilderingly, turned him from that bulldog into a whipped pussycat, at which point the film mercifully ends.
Besides its sociological and historical aspects, the film, made as the Vietnam conflict was just beginning to percolate in the United States and public sentiment had not yet shifted into the polarizing mind-set of the next decade, failed most at what it was originally intended to be, a non-musical vehicle to show off Frank Sinatra’s acting chops. Still chasing his 1953 Oscar-winning performance in Fred Zinnemann’s gripping From Here to Eternity, and on the lookout for a role that could revive his dramatic legitimacy after an uneven series of performances (Otto Preminger’s 1956 The Man with the Golden Arm the best, Stanley Kramer’s 1957 The Pride and the Passion the worst), Sinatra had purchased the film rights to Never So Few prior to the book’s publication. Woefully miscasting himself as a militant guerrilla warrior, he looks especially scrawny on-screen, with an unexplained jungle goatee. The rest of the film seems to be little more than a vehicle for Sinatra’s so-called Rat Pack, with Peter Lawford in an otherwise meaningless role.
Another member of Sinatra’s clan, Sammy Davis Jr., was supposed to play the role of Corporal Ringa, but shortly before the film was to begin production, during an interview Davis gave to Jack Eigen on a Chicago radio talk show, he broke