Ensign Pulver (1964)

Director: Joshua Logan
Writers: Joshua Logan and Peter S. Feibleman, based on the novel Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen
Stars: Robert Walker, Burl Ives, Walter Matthau, Tommy Sands, Millie Perkins and Kay Medford

Index: The First Thirty.

Ensign Pulver is a sequel to an adaptation of a play that was an adaptation of a novel, and it’s something of a scar on that franchise.

It began as Mister Roberts, a novel by Thomas Heggen, published in 1946 and based on what he went through in the Pacific theatre during World War II. It was soon adapted to the stage by Heggen and Joshua Logan, the play opening on Broadway in 1948 and winning five Tonys. It took seven years to bring it to the big screen but Henry Fonda came with it and delivered a seriously good performance, even if it was Jack Lemmon who won the Oscar.

Fast forward nine more years and the play’s director helmed this sequel, with precisely no returning actors and no Mister Roberts, hence the new name and focus. The former turns out to be a small problem but the latter a big one.

That’s because Mister Roberts was the heart of the story and, without him, there just isn’t much story. And that’s because the movie was set on a U.S. Navy cargo ship, the Reluctant, as it moves supplies from here to there but never anywhere near enemy action. Roberts signed up to be part of the war effort and thinks that he could be doing a lot more useful work than serving as the Reluctant’s Cargo Officer. Spoiler alert, but he gets his wish and is reassigned to a destroyer at the end of the film, where he’s killed by the enemy. That’s why he isn’t here.

Without him, it falls to his bunkmate, Frank Pulver, to lead the story and that wouldn’t be enough even if Lemmon had reprised his role. Instead we get Robert Walker, painfully young—he looks like he’s 12—and annoyingly goofy.

In Mister Roberts, Pulver is the comic relief to Roberts’s serious drama. Here, he’s the comic relief to, well, everybody else’s comic relief. It is suggested that Roberts’s mindset of wanting to be in the action has now transferred to the entire crew, but we don’t buy into that at all. I bought into Doc taking on Roberts’s ongoing battle with the tyrannical captain, but not too much, because it isn’t really in his character.

What this all means is that there’s not a lot of serious drama here and the film has to live or die on its comedy. Which is a tough task.

For a start, most of the jokes on board ship are recycled, sometimes verbatim, from Mister Roberts, making this feel as much of a remake as it is a sequel. What’s added doesn’t amount to much at all.

To give you an idea of how highbrow this is, my favourite part happens in the aftermath of Pulver shooting the captain in the ass during a screening of Young Dr. Jekyll Meets Frankenstein with a lead foil ball spiked with carpet tacks. The film shifts back and forth between footage of that film—largely borrowed from the 1936 Boris Karloff movie The Walking Dead—and Doc treating the captain’s buttocks while he speaks to the men over the ship’s PA system.

Eventually, Logan, who co-wrote the script with Peter S. Feibleman, must have decided he was getting nowhere on board ship, so jumped overboard. Well, technically, the captain falls overboard and Pulver dives in to save him and the two drift on a life raft until they wash up on an island where Pulver, who’s been talking up becoming a doctor, finds himself having to operate on his captain, following instructions from Doc on the Reluctant over the radio. It’s a desperate way to infuse drama into the script, but it’s all they had to work with.

At least it allows for one good thing, namely a look into why the tyrannical Captain Morton is the way he is. We didn’t get that from James Cagney in Mister Roberts because he was just a foil for the title character. Instead, we get it from Burl Ives here. Given that Pulver has an abiding fear of the captain, putting him on a life raft with his nemesis for however long is a good way to deal with that too.

Is there anything else good here? I did like Walter Matthau as Doc, even though he can’t match William Powell’s performance in Mister Roberts, which was his last screen role. And, in a variety of small parts as Reluctant crewmen are such recognisable faces as Larry Hagman, James Coco and Richard Gautier.

Oh, and Jack Nicholson. You may have been wondering where he was going to show up. It isn’t often, more’s the pity. He plays Dolan, the Reluctant’s radio officer, taking over from Ken Curtis in the first film. He’s perfectly fine but he doesn’t get a lot of scenes, so there’s almost no opportunity for him to shine.

He’s there as the film starts, as the crew sing Sentimental Journey from the deck behind the opening credits. He’s there soon after, sticking his head through the open porthole in Pulver’s cabin to pass on information. His biggest scene arrives as Doc treats the captain, as he reports each of the ship’s departments being ready for action. And he’s there right at the end of the picture too, as everything’s wrapping up, to inadvertently cause some trouble tied to a particularly key subplot that I haven’t told you about because, well, it isn’t worth the words.

I’m sure he was there at other points during the film too, because it’s a busy movie with an ensemble cast that primarily unfolds on board one cargo ship. There’s always plenty going on in the background. However, if he was, I didn’t particularly notice because it would have been transitory and unworthy of mention.

I wonder what Nicholson thought about his time on Ensign Pulver.

On one hand, it’s a tiny role that only gave him a few lines a long way down the credits. He’s not in the six names on the poster or the thirteen listed during the opening credits, but he does get his picture by his name in the end credits, one of fourteen to do so.

On the other, it’s an A picture, produced by Warner Bros. for $5m, making it a strikingly different experience to his previous film, The Terror, which Roger Corman almost plucked out of thin air, with a budget of whatever he had in his back pocket at the time. The Raven before it was surely the most lavish picture he had made up until this one and that was firmly a B movie made for $350k. Different leagues.

Whatever he thought, he promptly returned to low budget filmmaking, his next four films shot for Monte Hellman, the first two back to back in the Philippines and the others back to back in the Utah desert, but he wrote two of them and co-produced two. His acting career wasn’t taking off but he was keeping busy.