The Odd Couple

If a war movie has no body, it had better have plenty of soul. Hell in the Pacific is as immaterial as a fog, but it offers two soulful professionals: Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune.

In the waning days of World War II, a Marine pilot (Marvin) bails out over a tiny island in Micronesia. Like Robinson Crusoe, he mistakenly believes that he is all alone. His Friday, however, turns out to be a Japanese officer (Mifune), also beached for the duration.

Feinting and fighting, the two engage in their own mixed-up, microcosmic version of the war. The Japanese occupies the beach, the American the jungle, in a skirmish that seems to last longer than the Battle of Guadalcanal. Bereft of conventional weapons, the pair have at each other with sticks, fire, traps and maledictions. To no avail. Predictably, the hunters learn that they cannot survive without their quarries. Without speaking a word of each other's language, the odd couple eventually construct a raft and go off in search of rescuers. Stranded again on a different island, they find no one, and wander offscreen. . . .

Henry G. Saperstein, the film's executive producer, once boasted, "We thought of several endings, decided against the Mary Poppins type or the heroic windup of a John Wayne melodrama." They decided, in fact, on no ending at all, as if Director John Boorman had got weary of all that footage of sea, sand and sunsets and decided arbitrarily to fade out.

With his celebrated samurai style, Mifune creates a character of such sympathy that the American comes to trust his adversary. So much so that when he comes upon him in the jungle the Marine lowers his guard and mutters, "I thought you were a Jap." Marvin's unshaven, malarial soldier is a credible reflection of his own war experiences; he lends substance to a part with few lines and less motivation. Unfortunately, he was not content to get by with soul. Marvin likes to claim credit for the non-ending of the film. The non-meaning goes with it.

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