What a waste of my time!!!

Overrated

Let's be realistic.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

I read the reviews before watching it again after many years. Shocked, I was, to see that they weren't good. My plan was to see the movie and mount a spirited defense of it on this very site.I can't. I like romantic comedies. I like comedies from this era. I even like bad movies if they are sincere. This movie just makes me uncomfortable.Paul Newman, never one of my favorites, but a pretty decent actor, has no real range or depth in this role. I watched, expecting him to suddenly step forward and take charge of the movie, but he disappointed me...Joanne Woodward vacillates between stern wife and mother/retarded blonde. I think she was trying to be sexy, but came off as possibly addicted to Valium...Joan Collins was the one bright spot in this movie. She was sexy and vivacious...even funny from time to time...Gale Gordon (Mr. Mooney from the old Lucy Show) did okay with what he had.What they managed to do with some pretty talented actors was to create a movie where not only did I not care about the lives of any of the characters, I don't think I would've cared if any of them had been tortured to death, either.

Leo McCarey's next to last film and last in the comedy genre is Rally Round The Flag Boys. After his previous film My Son John got such bad reviews McCarey was hoping for a comeback of sorts. It was not to be for him.The man who gave us such comedy gems as Ruggles Of Red Gap, Duck Soup, and The Awful Truth had seen his best days. Why a lot of the gems from Max Shulman's book on which this film is based were left out of the screenplay we'd have to have a séance to ask McCarey. It's not a bad film, in fact it's pretty funny in spots, but it lacks the consistency of McCarey's previous cited work. And McCarey who was a serious practicing Catholic I don't think was the man to direct a sexpot like Joan Collins in the sexpot character she played here.The stars are the newly married Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward who wind up on the opposite sides of a local issue in their suburban town of Putnam's Landing. To wit the establishment of a local military base in their town. The army has a public relations problem and that's Newman's field. They even go so far as to have General Gale Gordon call in a favor or two and have Newman's Naval Reserve status activated and special orders cut attaching him to the army. They need his public relations skills badly because half baked blundering oaf Jack Carson is the commander of said base.The subplot also involves Newman feeling neglected as Woodward wraps herself up in various civic causes, the prevention of the army base being the latest. He's feeling a real itch and neighbor Joan Collins who is also neglected by eternally busy husband Murvyn Vye is quite ready to scratch it.The physical comedy comes off the best, the highlight of the film in my opinion is the historical pageant that Joanne attempts to put on which ends in disaster. Joanne at this stage of her career is far better at comedy than her husband. Paul would have to wait until Slapshot before he had a real hit in comedy although I've always felt The Secret War Of Harry Frigg is underrated.Before they became Dobie Gillis and Thalia Menninger on television Dwayne Hickman and Tuesday Weld played opposite each other in this film. Someone must have noticed the chemistry there.Rally Round The Flag Boys has some good moments, but it is far cry from the pinnacle of Leo McCarey's career in the Thirties.

I find that occasionally I recall the time I first watched a film with better clarity than the film itself. I wish this was one of them. RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! apparently came from a very funny book by Max Shulman, but that I'd expect. From what I've read in the other comments the novel's framework seems to have been kept, but Shulman's witty barbs thrown out. This is frequently the case with Hollywood treatments of good books (i.e.: even if you liked Robert Redford's version of THE GREAT GATSBY, it and the previous one with Alan Ladd can't match Fitzgerald's terrific novel). I first saw this film (I've seen it two times, strangely enough) when it was shown about 1962 or 1963 on Saturday NIGHT AT THE MOVIES on television. Paul Newman was at the then height of his early film career as one of the best of the "Young Turk" breed of actors with Brando and Clift. But while doing well with dramas (SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME, THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, HUD, THE HUSTLER, HOMBRE) he failed to register any real success as a comic actor. In the long run it did not matter (it was just the choice of material). Films like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE STING, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, SLAP SHOT) all eventually showed he did have a mastery of comedy - but not bedroom farce. Leave that to his contemporary Rock Hudson. Actually I think Newman's first successful comic part (he was not the star of the whole film) was as the second doomed husband (the painter) in Shirley MacLaine's WHAT A WAY TO GO.RALLY, 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! like his other early doomed comedy, A NEW KIND OF LOVE, co-starred his wife Joanne Woodward. Both appeared together (to better advantage) in the more dramatic THE LONG HOT SUMMER, which did have some normal comic sections that Newman did well with Woodward and Orson Welles and Tony Franciosa. But that film blended comedy and drama, and the comic sections emphasized the conniving spirit of Newman's character Ben. Here he is a business executive returning to Putnam's Landing, Connecticut daily from his job in Manhattan. While such a position is not impossible to see Newman in, it is not handled as a similar situation was for Rock Hudson in his last Doris Day romp, SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Hudson's business executive went home with next-door-neighbor Tony Randall, and manages to depress the ebullient Randall with dire personal news. With Newman one imagines he just reads the New York Times on the way home. Woodward is there of course (as Doris was for Rock), but while one sees the sparks of personal chemistry between them, they don't translate to the humor that just sparkled between Doris and Rock on screen.The plots in the movie are three: the trouble of the community regarding a new military base (connected, as it turns out, to the space program) being built near their town; the rocky personal relationship between married Paul and Joanne - especially as local rich witch (what else would she be?) Joan Collins thrown in; and the romance of young Tuesday Wells with Dwayne Hickman, who finds the competition rising - as do his fellow civilian teenage jocks - from the local military looking for relaxation on weekends. Joanne becomes the leading, anti-base spokesperson. She is confronted by base commander Gale Gordon, and his assistant Jack Carson. Given this set-up the viewer knows who is more likely to win.Of the scenes I recall best, Collins and Carson did the most with material. Collins, of course, is an attractive woman (and here she was fantastic to look at), and one shot I recall when she and her target Newman are drinking and dancing together is of them bumping (possibly on purpose by her) derrières. She certainly brought spice into her scenes. Carson did what he could. Only a year before he gave one of his most dramatic performances in THE TARNISHED ANGELS with Hudson, Dorothy Malone, and Robert Stack, and in 1958 he would do yeoman work as Newman's bitter brother Goober in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, but the material there (Faulkner's PYLON and Tennessee Williams' CAT) helped him. Here he is a put-upon middle man taking orders barked out by Gordon and trying to restrain angry impulses of his own towards the townspeople. Yet he did do well, especially in two sequences which were relatively simple: the Thanksgiving pageant (where he keeps slipping on a wet rock supposedly representing Plymouth Rock), and the final shot where he is outsmarted by somebody who shouldn't have outsmarted him. The Thanksgiving pageant has it's moments, with Hickman (as an Indian) leading his fellow "Indians" onto the oncoming "Pilgrims" (the soldiers from the base). And there is also the apparently unheralded capsizing of "the Mayflower", all to the amazement of pageant coordinator and narrator Woodward. Unfortunately even this suffers from comparison to other films. Think of the Thanksgiving pageant in ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES where Wednesday releases tensions at her school by giving the actors playing the Pilgrims a "grim" view of what happened to the Native Americans in the U.S. due to the arrival of the Europeans. She was far more eloquent, and one sympathized with the point of view (even if descended from those Europeans). Somehow that seemed more relevant for consideration in such a situation than whether quiet Putnam's Landing should accept the missile base next to it.So, for the sake of the comic (and sexy) bits I liked, I will give this film a "6" rather than anything higher. Without those it would have been lower.

Max Shulman was an absolutely brilliant comic writer/satirist ("The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," "Anybody Got a Match?", etc.). In the mid-50s he published "Rally 'Round The Flag, Boys!" taking on everything from Madison Avenue, the New Haven Railroad, the U.S. Air Force to the space race in a hilarious farce that shows how seemingly unconnected lives, priorities and events can converge to produce a disaster of epic proportions. Even little league gets a drubbing at his hands.This movie took the title and many of the book's characters. For some reason, the writers and producers chose to discard everything else.Newman could have been GREAT as Harry Bannerman, harried Peter Pan-type account exec facing the prospect of fatherhood and settling down. Unfortunately, the script sabotaged him. Joanne Woodward is relegated to standing around looking hastled and confused-- probably trying to decide exactly how she's going to kill her agent for getting her into this dog. Veterans like Gale Gordon, Jack Carson and Murvyn Vye are similarly wasted.The only cast member who doesn't disappoint, strangely enough, is Tuesday Weld as Comfort Goodpasture . . . but then, her character didn't have much to do in the book either, come to think of it.This is what happens when Hollywood bends over backwards to avoid offending anyone . . . after having purchased the rights to a book that's guaranteed to offend just about everyone.There is a character named Hoffa in this film. Oscar, not James. Probably the best thing that could be done with this turkey of a movie would be to take the master copy, seal it up in an empty bottle of "Newman's Own," and bury it about six feet under Hoffa. James, not Oscar.