Sergeant King: "Why ain’t you dead?" Will Stockdale: "No excuse, sir." Old service/uniform comedies have been a great playground to talk about hope against hope through humour, a perfect landscape for enemies and friends in unlikely places, in peacetime or other times. I also find them inexplicably comforting to watch. "No Time for Sergeants" (1958) is based on the hilarious one-of-a-kind novel by Mac Hyman, which also saw a Broadway adaptation and a brilliant 1955 teleplay for the US Steel Hour. The film stars Andy Griffith as simple country boy Will Stockdale who stumbles/makes his way through military service with a blind optimism and golden-retriever strength and innocence that confuses and distresses all those around him who think less of him and would even like to see him fail. Will cheerfully causes a fight in his barracks (and a bar), gets his sergeant (the joyful-to-watch Myron McCormick) in trouble without meaning to one bit, miraculously passes all his classification tests after hilariously distressing at least two officers, and gets into the Air Force, all the way up into a plane that soars through the night, and that's not even half of it.
With an unaware Taoist effortlessness not to prove anything, Will not only makes it with happy chaos in his wake, but manages to tread big and finally come out on top. In its own quiet way, the film allows you to gently see humour in matters as serious as intelligence, the military, masculinity, and class/socio-economic discrimination. Will's 'holy fool' holds up an innocently questioning mirror to these that means he doesn't have to walk to anyone else's orders, just his own thoughts in a world that tells him that's impossible. And he does this with a persistent, almost stupidly radiant optimism, displayed when he says "Well it just goes to show you how good things happen to you when you're least expecting them." Xo
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