No Dirty Habits: Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison

SteynonLine ^ | September 21, 2024 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

When John Huston's crew arrived on the island of Tobago in September of 1956 to begin filming his new picture, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, 20th Century Fox were hoping that it would repeat the massive success of The African Queen – another story about a mismatched couple stranded in the wilderness, pitted against a well-armed enemy in a backwater of a global war.

It was a war picture, but a decade since World War Two had ended these had gone from propaganda pictures (Bataan, Destination Tokyo) to gritty dramas full of battle scenes (Battleground, 12 O'Clock High) to adventure pictures with a wartime setting (The Desert Rats, The Colditz Story) to whatever Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was supposed to be. Like The Caine Mutiny or The Man Who Never Was, it was a drama whose stakes were raised by wartime, but more about characters than victory in any campaign or the success of any mission.

And at a time when you could count on your audience containing at least a few veterans of the last war, it was the sort of serious picture a generation who had lived through that war wanted to see and show to their families. And it was the kind of film that won Oscars – like The Bridge on the River Kwai, released the same year as Huston's film. Its star, Robert Mitchum was making his bread and butter appearing in war films like The Enemy Below, The Hunters, The Angry Hills and The Longest Day over the next five years.

The film begins, after telling us that it's 1944 and that we're "somewhere in the South Pacific", with Mitchum, alone and adrift on a rubber raft, being slowly washed ashore on an isolated island.

[daniel1212]

Spare me

? That should be the prayer of this nation to the God whose salvation it needs.

Thank you for your service.

[minnesota_bound]

A real man and a real woman in that picture.
No skinny boy and girl.