Did the world need Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way in 1965? Does it need it now? After all if you’re in the market for a big, formless war movie shot in expensive-looking black and white and starring John Wayne, there is and was 1962’s The Longest Day. But Day was Europe and Way is the Pacific, the thinking obviously went. And so here we are.
The action kicks off in Pearl Harbor on the evening before it’s bombed by the Japanese. By the end of the attack the film’s two main characters, heroic Captain Rock Torrey (John Wayne) and his no-less-courageous first officer Commander Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas), have both been busted down to desk-jockey duties by a sissified Navy, their improvisation in the heat of battle, pluck and risk-taking bravado clearly counting for nothing when weighed against following orders.
Bit unfair, you might think. The film certainly does. Order is restored when it finally becomes apparent to the same Navy top brass that their current number-one man, Admiral Broderick (Dana Andrews), is an ass-covering time-server not up to the task of organising an attack on a heavily fortified island held by the Japanese. Torrey and Eddington are recalled in time for the guns-blazing finale and get back to trading dialogue steeped in heroic masculine understatement.
While they’ve been in exile, we’ve learned more about these two. Torrey has met up with Jeremiah (Brandon De Wilde), his estranged son, a weakling with strong ideas about “Roosevelt’s war”, as he disparagingly calls it. Raised by his mother alone, Jere (as everyone calls him, “jerk” just a letter away) is a prissy milquetoast who lacks a real man in his life. Divorced Torrey has also started up a fledgling relationship with a nurse, Maggie (Patricia Neal), a ministering angel of mercy and a real woman of the old school. Eddington, whose own wife died in the film’s opening moments having sex on the beach with AN Other while Eddington was at sea, has started getting ideas about a pretty young nurse, Annalee (Jill Haworth). Annalee shares lodgings with Maggie and, handily, she’s also as good as engaged to Rock’s son. It all gets a bit fraught, leading to a shock turn of events.
Preminger’s love of a headline-grabbing social issue in film’s such as The Man with the Golden Arm (drug addiction) and Advise and Consent (homosexuality) is given its head in this shock plot development, which acts as a major corrective to In Harm’s Way‘s main theme of masculinity in all its Spartan glory, uncompromised by soft living and lax morals. Before the meat-eating dudes of the manosphere embrace In Harm’s Way as one of their own, they need to be aware it comes with a major sting in the tail.
Preminger is Janus-faced in other respects. Take his attitude to realism. Fluid, nimble cameras give everything a “you are right there” feel, but look at everyone’s hairstyles and clothes. Preminger either can’t be bothered going for 1940s authenticity, or he’s up to something with all the 1960s looks, fashions and even dialogue.
This is a big movie. Efficiently shot, snappily written, with editing that adds pace to the expansive Panavision looks. DP Loyal Griggs, the go-to man for the most epic of epics, like The Ten Commandments, lays on lots of deep focus. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is excellent, widescreen when necessary but subtle too. Great titles man Saul Bass did the credits, though they come at the end, unusually.
And the names are big too. Henry Fonda in what’s little more than a bit part. Franchot Tone in a blink-and-miss him role as a desk-jockey naval big noise. It cannot match The Longest Day for A-list bulk but as well as Dana Andrews there is a lot of down-table talent here – Burgess Meredith, George Kennedy, Slim Pickens, and even Stanley Holloway (one year on from playing Eliza Doolittle’s father in My Fair Lady), as an Australian co-opted onto the American mission.
It’s all good and the scenes individually are sharp and clear but there’s just too much of it. There are characters – like Mac (Tom Tryon) and his wife Beverly (Paula Prentiss) – who could be removed entirely without any harm being done. For all its fine acting and impressive action, the suspicion lingers that this film’s real raison d’etre is to be The Second Longest Day.
In Harm’s Way – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
