Jackie Gleason and Steve McQueen Made an Odd Couple in Ralph Nelson's "Soldier in the Rain"

The 1963 movie "Soldier in the Rain" combines a dumb comedy focusing on Steve McQueen as a not-very-bright sergeant with wacky get-rich schemes and one of the least-likely romances in the annals of Hollywood: between Jackie Gleason and Tuesday Weld. The first half hour is like a mediocre sit-com series with the savvy Master Sergeant Maxwell Slaughter (portrayed by Gleason) showing himself to be a master at working the SNAFU-prone system of the U.S. Army at some Southern base and the protector/mentor/exploiter of the enthusiastic but not-very-bright caricature of Southern American males as Sergeant Eustis Clay. Sgt. Slaughter gets Sgt. Clay out of trouble slightly more often than he gets him into it. Sgt. Slaughter is a mix of Sgt. Bilko, Milo Mindbender from "Catch-22," the unheroic Hogan of "Hogan's Heroes," and a land-bound version of Ernest Borgnine's McHale. Tom Poston plays the easily manipulated officer who supposedly commands sergeants Clay and Slaughter.

Tuesday Weld pops up as an even more stereotyped (than McQueen) dim-witted Southerner, a high-school senior and airhead named Bobby Jo Pepperdine. She is hurt that Sgt. Slaughter refers to her as an imbecile. He is somewhat surprised that she knows the word, and an incongruous romance develops between the polite and erudite older man and the enthusiastic bimbo who appears to have considerably more sexual--or at least dating and c__k-teasing--experience. Like Sgt. Slaughter the viewer (at least this viewer) is gradually won over to the view that her sensibility is more complicated than the cotton candy she loves.

The first half hour is a comedy of manipulating a military sinecure, the second a romantic comedy between "Fatty" and airhead. The final half hour lurches into more genres with Sgt. Clay losing those whom he most cares about with a prolonged bar-room brawl in between. Steve McQueen was a very wooden action star of the 1960s. His stubbornness was occasionally funny, and in addition to looking confused, he could grin, but his comedic talent was small. The audience sympathizes with him (at least I did) when he is mistreated (including, early on by Slaughter), and he attains some subtlety of sorrowful comradeship in a hospital scene in the last quarter hour of the movie.

Sgt. Clay has an odd protege of his own, a Yale-educated long-distance runner who cannot hold any alcohol, Private First Class Jerry Meltzer, played effectively by Tony Bill ("Shampoo" etc.).

Jackie Gleason was a big (in every sense) television comedy star in the 1950s. My vague memories of reruns of "The Honeymooners" is that he mugged a lot (if less than Art Carney) and specialized in the slow burn. Gleason's Sgt. Slaughter is a more delicately nuanced performance. As in his greatest triumph just before making "Soldier in the Rain," Minnesota Fats in "The Hustler," he is suave and knowing with an undercurrent of regret.

The latter two qualities also fit his other memorable movie role, in "Requiem for a Heavyweight," which was also directed by Ralph Nelson who was at the helm of several sentimental hit movies of the 1960s (Lilies of the Field, Charly, plus, a childhood favorite of mine, "Once a Thief"--a version of Les Miserables set in San Francisco with Alain Delon as the Jean Valjean character, with Jack Palance cast as his brother(!)), Ann-Margaret as his wife, and Van Heflin as his implacable pursuer).

Alas, after his impressive early-1960s acting, Gleason sank into a series of "Smokey and the Bandit" movies to which "imbecilic" could justly be applied. McQueen went on to roles requiring little emoting and was memorable as "Bullit," and as "Junior Bonner" and in "The Thomas Crown Affair", "The Getway," "Sand Pebbles" and in the rollicking movie based on William Faulkner's final novel, The Rievers.) During the early 1960s, he also reacted to Lee Remick in "Baby the Rain Must Fall" and to Natalie Wood in "Love with a Proper Stranger" (and was not dissuaded by punishment for failed escape attempts in "The Great Escape"). Accents were beyond his limited ability: the one here probably was intended to be southern, but is rooted in no place on this plant.

The nearly plotless script with a peculiar mix of nuance and stereotype was written by Blake Edwards (who also produced the movie) along with his recurrent collaborator ("The Pink Panther," "The Great Race"), Maurice Richlin. They gave Gleason some good lines, my favorite of which is this review's title.

The ending is abrupt, and the mood swings wildly, but "Soldier in the Rain" is worth viewing to see the mostly unrealized (-elsewhere) potential of "the Great One," the justly first-billed Jackie Gleason.