Cinema: In Praise of Cowardice

The Ameicanization of Emily.

“As long as valor remains a virtue.” says the unheroic hero of this film. ” we shall have soldiers. So I preach cowardice Cowards run at the first shot. If everybody did, we would never get to the second shot. I’m a coward, and I Say that cowardice will save the world!”

Playwright Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script for Emily, obviously intended a black comedy in the style of Dr. Strangelove, a savage sneer at war and all it bloody works. But if Strangelove with cheery ferocity reminded its audiences that every cloud has a strontium lining. Emily in confused conclusion managers to suggest that every human value has a wormy caramel center.

The film, praise be to Paddy, bitter before it turns sweet. The cowardly hero (James Garner) is a fat cat who finds that military life in London in the days before D-day is just his bowl of cream. While millions of Britons quenu up for rations, the hero inhabits an Eden teeming with rivers of bourbon,sierras of sirloin and herds of gorgous girls who will do almost anything for a Hershey bar. Happily, there is a serpent in this paradise: an admiral (Melvyn Douglas) more concerned about congressional hearings (“They’re tryin’ to scrap the Navy!”) than he is about the Germans.

“I’ve got it!” the admiral bellows one night in a manic epiphany. “The first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor! We’ll build him a monument -the Tomb of the Unknown Sailor.” Telegrams crackle, Joint Chiefs harrumph, orders arrive, engines clamor, machine guns cachinnate, and sure enough, the first dead man on Omaha Beach turns out to be-Garner. Next day every daily in the U.S. front-pages his picture, but a week later the corpse turns up alive. “Omigawd!” gasps the officer (James Coburn) in charge of public relations. “Instead of a dead hero we’ve got a live coward!” The situation presents obvious opportunities, and before he succumbs to a cynical conclusion Chayefsky takes some of them firmly in hand. He writes a couple of smartingly satiric scenes and puts together some pretty shrewd pacifist repartee. Naval officer proudly: “He was the first dead man on Omaha Beach!” Civilian innocently: “Was there a contest?” But Chayefsky dissipates the main force of his satire by chasing the main chance for commercial success.

He aims most of his episodes at the audience for bell-bottom farce -Actor Garner plays them like a nightclub comic imitating Fred MacMurray. Chayefsky further confuses the issues with a lardy interlarded love story -Actress Julie Andrews plays it as though abre-acting a childhood crush on Greer Garson. “All those men moaning,” Julie tremulously murmurs to another young woman. “When they healed, they’d come hoping to spend their last nights of leave with me. I couldn’t say no to them, could I? I’d just lost my husband at Tobruk, and I was overwhelmed with tenderness for all dying men. As I say, I’m grotesquely sentimental . . . but whatever are you doing with your hair?” Tearing it out by the roots, dear.