Day 30: Film with Great Joy (part i)
Sergeant King: “Why ain’t you dead?” Will Stockdale: “No excuse, sir.” I’m
closing with two choices! The first is the film adaptation of “No Time for
Sergeants” (1958) 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, including this one, 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 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 (think of him as a predecessor to Gomer Pyle!) 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, a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Hollywood rustic. Will's
‘holy fool’ holds up an innocently questioning mirror to all of this, not
marching to anyone else’s orders, just his own mind, in a world that tells him
he can’t. 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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