This film is an atypical 50's farce, and with that in mind it is mildly entertaining. The best scene, and it is worth watching it to see this one line, is when the upstairs neighbor comes down to the working Tom Ewell, Rita Moreno is wonderfully seductive and reminds Tom that this reminds her of a movie she saw, where the beautiful neighbor comes down to see the man who's wife is away (if you know Tom Ewell, you know what movie she's talking about). Tom looks up from his typewriter and with a wonderful deadpan says "I didn't see that movie." Okay, I love a good inside joke. The rest is just 50's movie silliness ... like I said, it is entertaining.
Plot summary
TV writer Greg Whitcomb did his military service heroically but now has settled into everyday life with a young wife, Katy. A letter from the war department arrives that Katy believes is calling Greg back to active duty from the Air Force reserve, but she hides it during a party celebrating their wedding anniversary.
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September 18, 2024 at 05:33 AM
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Almost worth it for one scene
Good fun
Long overshadowed by director Frank Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It (also 1956), The Lieutenant Wore Skirts is deserving of reappraisal. Starring hatchet faced Tom Ewell as Greg Whitcomb, a U.S. Air Force reservist with a bad knee and a wife (Sheree North) in the service, it's a thoroughly sexist but hilarious film. When North is ordered to serve in Hawaii, Ewell follows after her, determined to get her to quit or be discharged by hook or by crook. Forced to stay home cleaning dishes, cooking dinner, and playing bridge with the girls, he soon cooks up a plot to convince base psychiatrist Edward Platt that his wife is suffering from a nervous breakdown. Shot in brilliant Technicolor and in Cinemascope, this is 50s cinema eye candy par excellence, but the film also benefits from a snappy (and at times, quite daring) Tashlin screenplay. Besides the always wonderful Ewell, the film also features an hilarious performance by Rita Moreno as an air-headed beauty who gives him ideas.
That wild blue yonder
Tom Ewell settled and married to Sheree North whom he met while in the Air
Force is now a hack Hollywood writer and one of those married to the dwelling
50s types. She was in the service herself and married Ewell there.
Now Ewell's been recalled to active service kind of like the way Jimmy Stewart
was in Strategic Air Command. But then Ewell gets out when he flunks the
physical. All that soft Hollywood living.
But North being the dutiful wife she is goes out and reenlists just to be with her hubby. At that point Ewell finds himself in the same position Cary Grant
was in with Ann Sheridan in I Was A Male War Bride.
With women doing just about all the jobs in today's military a lot of the humor
of The Lieutenant Wore Skirts is kind of lost. But as Ewell who gives up Hollywood for Hawaii settles down to domestic simplicity at base housing where North is stationed. Even him participating in a bridge game with the
other spouses is cause for disruption of the normal social order.
Ewell and North make a fine married team. She's certainly a good girl to come
home to if she was not the breadwinner. Note some good performances by
Rick Jason as a fighter jet ace on the make for North or whomever is available
and Les Tremayne as Ewell's cheerfully hedonistic agent.
Ewell and North fly high here in nothing but friendly skies.