Reviews

Average musical almost redeemed by Terry-Thomas and Peter Sellers as the villains as well as by special effects that surpassed most of those of the 50s.

The Peggy Lee songs do not come near matching those of The Lady and the Tramp. The dance numbers are not well choreographed. Alan Young, an acquired taste at best, stumbles through his role as Woody.

Still, it's not a complete failure as a movie. Russ Tamblyn is energetic, the Forest Queen is pretty, and the story is sweet.

The IMDb tells me that I need 10 lines in a review. I'm sure the powers that be are much too young to have read the short zingers in _Time_ and _The New Yorker_ of 50 to 60 years ago.

Incredible aerial combat scenes redeem a poorly written and acted story. The Zeppelin sequence illustrates the intensity and ultimate futility of that form of warfare. The dirigibles, shown as capable of doing a great deal of damage, are also shown to be death-traps incapable of protecting themselves from determined attacks. The dogfights seem as realistic as anything you are likely to see this side of actual combat, probably because they were filmed using stunt pilots, many of whom participated in the real thing a decade or so earlier.

The story is so weak, however, even more so when one realizes that such strong plays as "What Price, Glory" and novels such as "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "A Farewell to Arms" were available as models to Howard Hughes and his writing stable.

Also jarring to my modern (but not necessarily superior) sensibility is the switches to blue monochrome scenes that occur more or less at random throughout the movie. Perhaps audiences in the the 1930s appreciated the addition of tints, I surely did not.

One final comment, it was helpful to realize that the imperious, officious Prussian officer stereotype preceded World War II films by many years

The movie really starts moving when the Robert Ryan character, up till then something of a b*****d, gets stranded in the desert. The movie then turns into an excellent man-against-nature film. Excellent acting by Robert Ryan.