In Love and War (1958)

Director: Philip Dunne

Cast: Robert Wagner, Dana Wynter, Jeffrey Hunter

Synopsis: The story of how the personal lives of three US marines affects their behaviour on the battlefield.

In Love and War is a fairly ordinary war drama which gives us an insight into three enlisted men’s home lives before showing how this influences their behaviour on the battlefield.   Robert Wagner (Broken Lance, Between Heaven and Hell) plays the troubled kid from the wrong side of the tracks, battling his innate cowardice and a bullying stepfather at home; Bradford Dillman (Bug) is the rich kid with a drunken socialite girlfriend who falls for a nurse, and finally there’s Jeffrey Hunter (Fourteen Hours, The Great Locomotive Chase), who’s just discovered his girlfriend is pregnant.

The script’s few ham-fisted attempts at humour fall chiefly on the shoulders of Robert Wagner.   A seasoned comic would have trouble wringing laughs from the drunken lines he’s called upon to deliver here but Wagner,as we all know, wasn’t even funny in Austin Powers.   The story does get more interesting once it moves away from the domestic troubles of our young heroes and out onto the battlefield, although even then there are problems.   It’s difficult to figure out who is who a lot of the time, and Wagner seems to get over his cowardice in unconvincingly double-quick time.

(Reviewed 12th December 2011)