Scott Reviews Blake Edwards’ Operation Petticoat [Blu-ray Review]

It all came back to one image – Cary Grant, looking through a periscope, commanding a submarine. Tony Curtis, taking (perhaps undeserved) credit for the development of Operation Petticoat, kept returning to that image he saw, in 1942’s Destination Tokyo, the film that both inspired him to join the Navy and, later, thanks to Cary Grant’s performance therein, become an actor. And now it’s 1959, and here he is, sparring with Cary Grant aboard a submarine. What a world.

And what a picture! Operation Petticoat starts off surprisingly placid for as wild as it gets. Grant, an Admiral, solemnly boards the USS Sea Tiger, which is hours away from the scrapyard. When he gets below deck, he settles into quarters, and begins reading from his logbook, which begins just a few days into World War II, when he captained the sub. His story is certainly an unusual one – a nearly-destroyed vessel, put back together with dedication and stolen parts, takes to the sea, wherein they will rescue a group of shipwrecked nurses, steal a pig, get painted pink, and eventually saved thanks to some carefully-deployed undergarments. Though Grant is ever the professional, his crew is a motley bunch, in particular an admiral’s assistant who only joined the Navy in the hopes of marrying a rich woman, and takes a similarly mercenary approach to his day-to-day activities. That’s Tony Curtis.

Curtis excels at playing a hustler, managing to stay one step ahead of whatever outfit would just as soon see him dead. His Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success is probably his most indelible creation, the perfect fast-talker with almost nothing to sell, but for the comedic side of that fatalistic coin, check out Boeing Boeing (another Olive Films release, as a matter of fact). Here, he’s a little more successful in his pursuits, and thus a little less desperate. He can get nearly anything the ship requires, you just might not want to know where it comes from. He can seduce almost any woman, she just might not want to ask where he’s been the night before, or where he’ll be the night after. This is not the type of guy typically glorified in World War II movies, but I’ll bet a good deal of the contemporary audience fought alongside guys much like him, or fancied themselves to be such.

This casualness drives the film. It’s a two-hour film that’s overlong by comedic standards, but right on time by Rio Bravo‘s. The kind of film that establishes a cast of interesting personalities and watches them collide in various situations. Things really go the way of a more compassionate M*A*S*H once the women come aboard; Joan O’Brien may be introduced breasts-first, but even she gets some character beats as the film goes on. There’s plenty of time for everyone, after all.

The set pieces are brilliantly conceived, many of them drawn from actual naval instances, but the humor beats come purely from the way the characters react to them, not any particularly clever lines nor brilliant bits of timing. Just seeing the mechanic try to comprehend a girdle suddenly helping the ship run, or Curtis being forced to trade his fancy shoes away for a pig he stole, or he and Grant lightly sparring over just about anything. The situations don’t get really dangerous until the end, and by then, we can’t imagine the film would betray us by killing these people off. It’s a war film in which death doesn’t come into play, in which honor and bravery are rather distant reasons for shipping out, and the crew’s one chance at actually accomplishing something for their country is rather hopelessly bungled. It’s a hell of a good motion picture.

Olive Films sticks to their Olive Films ways in presenting a crisp transfer of a slightly dinged, but altogether quite fine, source print. The colors are strong without feeling overcranked – the pink submarine is probably the best place to look for this, though the islands they visit have plenty to marvel at. The image is crisp and clear, just exhibiting some damage marks here and there; audio is quite clean as well. As usual, there are no special features.

Olive continues to do a tremendous job rescuing these lost treasure films, the kind that aren’t going to make any best-of-all-time lists, but which nonetheless are terrifically entertaining and plenty worthwhile. I definitely recommend checking out Operation Petticoat.