Cinema: Three Rescueteers

Flight from Ashiya. There’s something about a soldier. In the movies, there’s usually something sappy about a soldier. In this film, worse yet, there’s something downright phony about the men of the Air Rescue Service.

Yul Brynner, for instance, looks just right for his role as a crewman on a search plane—after all, he has a built-in radome—but it’s hard to put much stock in the character he portrays: a Japanese Polack with a Russian accent and an Arab girl friend (Daniela Gaubert). As for Richard Widmark and George Chakiris, they manipulate their seaplane like a couple of toddlers playing oogah in the old man’s crate.

So oogah! and away they go to rescue the crew of a Japanese freighter. On the way Chakiris and Widmark sleep at the stick for as long as 20 minutes, while the customers fossick through expository flashbacks. No sweat, however. Everybody can plainly see that the search plane is parked on a sound stage and the Japanese are floundering in the studio tank. In this film it is the moviemakers who are really at sea.