Two military men, Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, who are rivals to begin with, grow more at odds with each other when Quirt is made Flagg's top sergeant. And when a local beauty comes between them, their rivalry escalates even further. But when they discover that the woman has marriage in mind, they now compete to try to avoid marching down the aisle - that is, until they are called upon to march into battle.
"Capt. Flagg" (James Cagney) leads a squadron of American marines in France towards the end of the Great War and is unexpectedly reunited with his rival in just about everything, "Sgt. Quirt" (Dan Dailey). Despite their differences in rank, the two compete on an even playing field most of the time - usually fuelled by booze and because they are chasing the same girl. The latter, in this instance, is "Charmaine" (Corinne Calvet) but what neither man realises is that she's got an agenda of her own, and her father is out to help her too - to get an husband. What now ensues sees the grimness of the war tempered by some light-hearted humour, but Cagney isn't really given enough to challenge him by John Ford and the film sort of crawls along in a very procedural fashion with too little action to sustain it's almost two hour duration. Though it would probably have been below his pay grade, I kept thinking that Sterling Hayden would have made for a better antagonist for "Flagg" but the scenes with Dailey and Cagney do inject some life here, and the narrative does sometimes remind us of the trauma of war, but for the most part I felt this a rather lacklustre effort from all concerned that isn't really very funny and that I'll quickly forget.
