I kind of liked it, even though it's a long, gushy, weepy mess of a movie. Interesting idea to have your two leads be flawed, marriage destroyers who fall in love once their spouses are either dead or in an institution and then surround them with a bevy of good, principled co stars, all set on a French island in the South Pacific during WW2. And maybe if George Stevens had directed and Marguerite Roberts had done the screenplay it might have worked. But, boy howdy, is George Seaton one dull, clunky film maker/scribe! Not only does the dialogue tend toward the loudly declamatory and overly dramatic when it should be quiet and/or terse (with certain exceptions, like William Holden's powerful, angry soliloquy about growing up half Native American in Montana) but the story has problems as well. Was it really necessary to withhold, until film's end, the very pertinent info that as a wife Deborah Kerr's character was as big a disaster as Holden was as a husband? I mean, we're not making a mystery here, guys, but examining human relationships and the movie is not dependent for its success or failure on last minute, gasp-type revelations. Not that there are a lot of those, either, in this very slow paced slog. Sure would have been nice, in a WW2 film, to have seen at least ONE battle scene and the sub plots involving William Redfield's tortured, humanistic chaplain and Dewey Martin's simply tortured soldier are where compelling goes to be executed. Fortunately, as other reviewers have noted, Thelma Ritter is around a lot to liven things up. And Holden and Kerr do what all fine actor/stars do, namely rise above Seaton's poor dialogue. C plus.
PS...Lousy cinematography, too. Whole thing looks like a second rate Movietone newsreel (although Puerto Rico does a decent New Caledonia imitation).
PS...Lousy cinematography, too. Whole thing looks like a second rate Movietone newsreel (although Puerto Rico does a decent New Caledonia imitation).