Baby Blue Marine

Baby Blue Marine

“Baby Blue Marine,” a film by John Hancock, ends on such a perplexing and inconsequential note that the audience tends to overlook all the good things it did before that. In fact, its first hour is so well done and interestingly put together that I almost thought it could be this summer’s sleeper. But then everything goes so hopelessly wrong with the story that acting and direction can’t save it: We leave feeling let down and a little angry.

The movie concerns itself with Jan-Michael Vincent as a trainee in Marine boot camp in 1943. He’s one of those guys who just can’t seem to make it; he’s with the idiot squad (our term), the screw-ups. He fails out of training, is put into civilian clothes and sent home in disgrace wearing a baby-blue suit designed for just this purpose.

But his luck changes, sort of, when he gets back to Los Angeles; there an ex-Marine knocks him cold and changes clothes with him so he can desert. When Vincent comes to, he’s got on hero’s dress blues. He hitchhikes vaguely eastward toward St. Louis (it would be too embarrassing to go home), and so he stops for a few days when in a little crossroads town where he meets a waitress (Glynnis O’Connor). It’s love at first sight; she invites him to spend some time with her family, and naturally takes him for a Pacific veteran.

He plays the deception straight not really lying so much as letting people tell themselves what they’ve figured out and we’re almost on his side. And she certainly is; she lets loose with an awestruck sigh after seeing him the first time, and her performance of high school crush is so right-on delicate that not one false moment slips through.

The girl’s parents like our young Marine; the town looks up to him; football games are attended, church is gone to, movies are seen, cheeseburgers are consumed at the Main St. cafe; it’s all very all American, except for the fact that there’s a detention camp nearby where Japanese Americans from San Francisco are being held.

One night three of them escape. The Army gets nervous and sends a posse out after them (“They’re big city kids with zoot suits and switchblades,” a townsman solemnly warns). And then when Vincent comes across the three of them on a riverbank somewhere, the movie goes totally wrong.

He tells them to surrender which they quite reasonably do and he’s helping them across the river when some trigger-happy local Army draftee shoots and hits Jan Michael instead of one of the escapees. Jan-Michael floats downstream, the locals and the three Japanese-Americans all jump in to save him, and then we flash forward to an ending (happy, mind you) that nothing up to now has prepared us for.

According to the movie’s promotion, Vincent is made out to be a hero who “becomes a hero by performing an act of bravery worthy of any full-fledged Marine”. However, in truth all he did was get shot unintentionally, fall into the river and get pulled out. Not one problem that is brought on by his deceitfulness gets resolved; the film never pursues its concern with incarcerating US citizens within its borders; we don’t know what happens between the young man and woman emotionally speaking or whether they cut a half hour off somewhere.

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