Nervous in the Service

Captain Newman, M.D. is a colossal, Eastman-Colored recruiting poster that makes a peculiar proposition: join the Air Force and see a psychiatrist. Unhappily, the Air Force turns out to be the same old Hollywood Air Farce; the psychiatrist (Gregory Peck) too often acts as if Captain Newman were Private Hargrove; and the moviemakers seem relentlessly determined to popularize psychosis. In this picture, paranoia is personable, sadism is scenic, catatonia is cute, and life on the funny farm is fun, fun, fun! It's fun to be truth-drugged by Psychiatrist Peck, a living doll of a twitch doctor who treats his patients as if they were people like himself. "One of these days," he squalls at them cheerfully, "you guys are gonna drive me nuts! Har! Har! Har!" Oh, that Peck really breaks the boys up, but he puts them all together again with sodium pentothal and sympathy. One after another they go from snakepit to cockpit, secure in the knowledge that Freud is their copilot.

Take Colonel Bliss (Eddie Albert), a brilliant staff officer who cracks up under the strain of command. After a few weeks under Peck's care he--come to think of it, Colonel Bliss commits suicide. But take Little Jim (Bobby Darin), a sad sack in a flat funk until Peck shoots him full of s.p. For about ten minutes Bobby lies on a cot making faces like Harpo Marx, and then zowie! he's cured. He flies back to his unit, takes off on a bombing mission, runs into flak and-- Well, who cares about the patients when nurses like Angie Dickinson are on duty--not to mention Tony Curtis.

Tony plays a male nurse, or maybe he's just a disorderly orderly, and he has even prettier teeth than Angle's. Unfortunately, he also has some impertinent jokes to tell, such as: "Whaddya mean, is psychiatry worth bothering with? One of these men may become another Eisenhower!" But anybody who imagines that M.D. has exhausted the subject of service breakdowns, had better go see Man in the Middle, which deserts the airborne troops and takes an altogether sober look at a psychopath in khaki.

"What do you think I am," demands Keenan Wynn, "some kind of nut?" Fortunately for Wynn, that is exactly what Lieut. Colonel Robert Mitchum thinks. As an American Army officer full of paranoiac fantasies, Wynn has admitted killing a British noncom stationed at his jungle outpost of Bachree because the sergeant was "defiling the white race" by consorting with native women. Mitchum, assigned to defend Wynn in a general court-martial, thinks that motive irrational enough for Wynn to plead insane and save his neck.

Trouble is, it is India in the year 1944. There's a war on, and at command HQ the best interests of Allied unity seem to demand the death penalty for a Yank who kills a limey. "He's got to hang," observes British Medico Trevor Howard. Only Mitchum thinks that justice must stand "apart from power and apart from might." All he has to do is locate the army psychiatrist who was shipped off to the bush because he wrote a medical report diagnosing Wynn's insanity. While looking, Mitchum consorts with France Nuyen, a plump little Eurasian nurse whose instinct for fair play seems limitless. "If you want to put your conscience on my pillow," she purrs, "it's all right with me."

Nothing is much better than all right in this black-and-white morality play adapted from Howard Fast's novel The Winston Affair. Mitchum plays Mitchum with laconic assurance, and a cast of veteran character actors is warmed up for a first-rate courtroom drama, a la Caine Mutiny, that only makes it to second. Some of the fault must lie with Director Guy Hamilton, who borrows his pace from those fans that whir lazily overhead in every tropical sinkhole. But justice triumphs, and the made-in-England script gives the saving final testimony to Trevor Howard (so rational, so decent, so British). Thus Man tosses off its message with a chaser of backhanded amity.

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