HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON

In 1951 director John Huston scored a big hit with ‘The African Queen’, and it seems like a few years later someone, maybe Huston himself, had the bright idea of trying to repeat a winning formula.

Instead of Africa in World War I we are somewhere in the Pacific in World War II, and instead of Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart as the mismatched companions we have Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum.

He’s Mr Allison, a US Marine who gets washed up on a tiny atoll which has just the one inhabitant, a nun Sister Angela who herself has only been there a few days.

Surprisingly they hit it off straightaway so any dramatic tension comes from whether they can avoid the Japanese who arrive shortly afterwards, and whether their relationship will develop romantically.

I was less interested in the first of these, so that a long and rather unbelievable sequence in which Allison tries to steal food from the Japanese camp struck me as a misstep.

Deborah Kerr, even though she has to put on an Irish accent, gives a typically accomplished performance which earned her yet another Oscar nomination. She makes the most of a screenplay which doesn’t give her a lot to work with. 

To my surprise she doesn’t get a scene where she expresses how torn she is between her devotion to the church and Allison’s marriage proposal. In fact the only concrete sign that she is torn at all comes when she runs distraught into the rain when Allison has had far too much to drink.

Their relationship, like the film overall, never really catches alight, although I was thankful that  Huston resisted attempts to inject into the film (which he cowrote) some of the sex that apparently is in the source novel.

But the film ends on a high note with a touching exchange between the two principals and a  nice final scene, to round off a well-made and engaging picture.

RATING: ✓ Cheers