Saturday, March 12, 2016

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)

Director: John Huston

Writers: John Lee Mahin, John Huston, Charles Shaw

Composer: Georges Auric

Starring: Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum

More info: IMDb

Tagline: They were alone on this Pacific Island... trapped behind enemy lines... the marine who had been thru Hell and Sister Angela with her supreme faith in God.

Plot: A marine and a nun form an unlikely friendship. The marine is shipwrecked on a Pacific island and the nun has been left behind there; they find comfort in one another as the two wait out the war.



My rating: 7/10

Will I watch it again?  No.

This one's been on my radar for decades.  Now that I've seen it, it played out almost exactly how I thought it would.  That's not a bad thing.  It's just that knowing this is a big title from Hollywood in the late 50s, you come to expect certain things.  Kerr and Mitchum do a fine job carrying the entire picture. The dialogue sometimes gets a little hokey but that's 50's Hollywood workin'.  The save the day moment near the end is way too convenient but up until then it's a nice little picture that's not aiming above its notions.  It's also not hard to see the similarities with THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1951) (same director) but it's more of a nod than a variation on a theme.  Maybe if the Italians made this twenty years later we could have had ourselves some tasty Nunsploitation action...hmmmmm...  This version (not my skeezy exploitation fever dream version) is currently on Netflix streaming with a nice widescreen print. 






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