The Army Game
Episode 3: The Paul Newman Trilogy
Paul Newman is so good looking, and he looks so good in a uniform, it’s hard to dislike his character as much as you want to. That smirk! Those eyes, so full of merriment and devil may care; and then by the end of the film, when the light has gone out, the eyes tell of disillusionment and despair. He plays Danny Scott, who joins the army along with his girlfriend Holly’s brother, Bert Scoffield. Danny’s mom and girlfriend accompany him and Bert to the basic training camp. Before anyone speaks, we hear folksy music on a loud-speaker, followed by an announcement of the time of day: It’s 21:55. That’s 9:55 pm. There is nothing unusual about Holly’s sadness at having to leave her boyfriend, nor in the mother’s dislike of barracks life. But when the mother pulls Danny aside, we see that their relationship is not quite…. appropriate? First of all, her goodbye kiss is a smacker full on the mouth. Then he calls her—his mother—“kiddo.” She implores her son to do what he needs to do because she can’t make it for long without him. Holly is in despair about her boyfriend being a soldier for two years, his mother regrets that “it’ll take weeks for his hair to grow back.”
After some opening credits, we go right into a horrible scene in the barracks. Paul Newman is screaming, crying, being carried. Soldiers are running around, confused and angry. Only we can hear Newman’s thoughts: We learn from his voice-over that he is faking. He plans to be medically & honorably discharged and have a pay out and spend it on himself and Holly, “and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh!” Meanwhile, the other soldiers, in the dark, argue about it: some think he’s having a genuine breakdown, others are convinced that he’s faking. They call him “Yellow Dan,” believing him to be cowardly and deceitful. One of these fellow soldiers is Shuber, played by the actor Sydney Pollack, who I always immediately associate with his performance as the agent in Tootsie (1982). Shuber tells the other soldiers about what he saw with respect to Danny: “Well, I’m laying there, see, and I’m zeroing in on the target, and all of a sudden, Scott goes like this—” and he screams in mockery of Danny’s meltdown.
I like the use of windows in the film. When we are in the barracks, we can see the figure that represents Paul Newman walking to his meeting with the psychologist (Edward Andrews). Sets often have windows, but in this case, there is special emphasis on what happens through them. In the office of said psychologist, we have another window where we can see outside. During the scene, Newman looks out the window. Meanwhile, the psychologist is attempting to see through his evasiveness. There is a correlation between looking through a window and trying to understand someone. Here, in the psych office, we learn a lot about Danny. He majored in Psychology. “I know this stuff cold,” he informs the doctor. He is calculated and unreadable, puzzling the doctor. The doctor, though, has a fairly good poker face too. The doctor and the commanding officer (Patrick McVey) are averse to making a mistake in Danny’s case. They would not simply discharge Danny and risk rewarding him or making some kind of undesired example for others to imitate. Yet the longer they deliberate, the more of a hassle it is to deal with him. Duties have to be found to keep him busy, and the more he lingers on the scene, the more upset the others who share his barracks become. Danny is dead weight for everyone. He is bullied and he becomes despondent and depressed; and the bullying just gets worse, as everyone’s frustration increases.
There is something about being in the military…. I enlisted in the navy after high school. The short answer to your inevitable, practically reflexive “why” is that I really had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Change of attitude starts to happen in your mind even before you reach boot camp, but obviously, once you get there, it’s like jumping in the cold water. You just start swimming because you don’t have any other choice. You fall into step. You get on board with the ‘navy way,’ or ‘army way,’ whatever it is. You find yourself solving problems without much thought between. You grow up fast, overnight really. You arrive at basic training in the dead of night. They keep you awake for hours and hours of “hurry up and wait” and paperwork and videos and talks; you have to write your social security number so many times, it becomes embedded in your automatic memory, and your last name becomes the only name that matters anymore; and by the time your head hits a pillow, you’re so immersed in this new way, you just forget about the world that existed before. I don’t remember too much, but I’m pretty sure I cried at some point that first night (it was morning, technically speaking, by the time we got to go to sleep.) I was in some kind of shock, but, like Frank Sinatra sings in “My Way,” I did what I had to. I folded my things the way I was told to. I fell in line with the cadence. I played the game. The Navy Game. There were tales of people faking crazy to get out, but the very idea sounded horrible to me. You could get into a world of trouble if you faked crazy and they could prove you faked it. Besides, I had seen that movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I had no wish to fake something that could land me in even worse trouble than having to shovel my food down my throat at a rate of seconds and do flutter kicks and push-ups. I judged it wiser to just do my best and get through it, God willing with my sanity intact.
Paul Newman’s character was unwilling to deal with the difficulty of the moment. He wanted to leap over the hardship and reap some kind of reward. What that was, exactly, is open to speculation. He wanted to defeat the army somehow, to outsmart the system. The problem is, and I know this from experience, the military is very intelligent. It is a well-oiled machine peopled with well-trained, methodical and precise individuals. We saw that in the film. The leadership was unwilling to take a chance and make a mistake. They wanted to be rid of Danny, but they took their time in order to do what was right in the long view. It all hung on the analysis of the psychologist, and he thought the situation was more complicated than met the eye. If Danny was not faking, then he was sick and needed help. If he was malingering, as the psychologist believed that the very fact of his faking would mean that he must be sick in another way. The psychologist genuinely wanted to help him. Danny, however, was offended at the suggestion that he was sick. He was wounded at the suggestion that he was sick; yet he was downright flippant about accusations that he was faking. We get the sense that Danny almost liked having people think he was a malingerer, for it meant that he was a step ahead of everyone. It was Danny, if he was faking, who was going to be victorious.
But what came first, the chicken or the egg, the faking or the sickness? Where is the beginning and end of the symptoms? I agree with the psychologist that it is highly probable, indeed likely, that sickness prompted the faking. The psychologist was interested in Danny’s recent past as a glorious athlete with many trophies and accolades. Danny clearly had a highly competitive streak and he was used to being adored and admired. He could have channeled that competitiveness toward becoming the best soldier, but he chose instead to try to scam the system, and that choice led to being bullied by the other soldiers, and it was all downhill from there.
I think the writers and producers had a particular message in mind. If we think strictly on the surface of things, Danny was overly coddled, a mama’s boy. Clearly the message was to encourage boys to ‘man up.’ It’s basically the Jordan Peterson ethos today—keep your room/house/life clean, take your shower, be responsible, and from responsibility, we derive meaning. Yada, yada, yada. That is all well and good, but there might be an underlying message too, unintended perhaps by the Kaiser Aluminum Hour. We can see a cycle of mental illness, reinforcing itself and being reinforced by its consequences. Newman’s character has self-awareness at the end, but he’s deep in the throes of anger, which all comes out toward his mother. What happens to him, what he does, is anyone’s guess. In real life, we either seek help in pulling ourselves up or fall deeper down the well of despair, indulging ourselves in destructive modes of coping.
It is, in my opinion, the best of the three in the “Paul Newman trilogy.” None of them are rotten tomatoes. If you can endure the awful music and low-quality filmmaking, you’ve got three films that will give you lots to contemplate, and you get to look at Paul Newman (he’s easy on the eyes) the whole time.
Credits
Written by: Loring D. Mandel and Mayo Simon
Executive Producer: “Unit Four” (whatever that was)
Director: Franklin Schaffner
Cast
Starring Paul Newman as Private Danny Scott
Edward Andrews as Major Berman (the psychologist)
Frank Campanella as Sergeant Hass
Philip Abbott as Private Manken
George Grizzard as Private Bert Scoffield (Holly’s brother/Danny’s friend)
Patrick McVey as Captain Lassiter
Haila Stoddard as Mrs. Scott (Danny’s mother)
Betsy Meade as Holly
Sydney Pollack as Private Shuber