Tab Wood and Natalie Wouldn't

Tomorrow morning and afternoon on TCM looks like a lineup of David Janssen movies, even though his birthday was actually in March. The day kicks off at 6:00 AM with The Girl He Left Behind.

Tab Hunter stars as Andy Shaeffer, place kicker on his college football team, and a pretty good student. He has to be the latter, as he's using college as a way to avoid the peacetime draft and intends to go on to law school just to keep being in school. Thankfully, he's got a mother (Jessie Royce Landis) who keeps indulging him, so money is never a problem.

Unfortunately, you know that with the way he comments on needing to keep up his grades so that he doesn't come to the attention of the draft board, something is going to happen. In this case, it's his girlfriend, Susan (Natalie Wood). She knows that Andy is a bit of a mama's boy (well, a lot of a mama's boy), something that's probably been a bone of contention between them for some time before the movie opens. She reaches her last straw, however, when he borrows her car and forgets to pick her up for one of her classes. They get in a quarrel, and that one little quarrel is enough for Andy to get a bunch of F's on exams and fluck out of college!

With Andy no longer being enrolled, the military can come for him, and sure enough he immediately gets drafted, and sent off to Fort Ord in northern California to do his basic training along with, among others, a young James Garner in a very early role. Among the sergeants leading basic training are Sgt. Clyde (Murray Hamilton) and Sgt. Hanna (Jim Backus, who seems much too old for the role); David Janssen plays their CO, Capt. Genaro.

Andy has been separated from his girlfriend and family, and is none too pleased about it. So he figures that since he comes from a well-to-do family, he can just use his class superiority to get what he wants, and not really follow orders. Unsurprisingly, everybody else in the army is pissed at Pvt. Shaeffer. The other privates going through basic training have to deal with the discipline he brings about, while the sergeants and Capt. Genaro actually want him to succeed, much like Jack Webb's character in The D.I.

Shaeffer is such a washout that he can't even follow basic orders, like watch for civilians who might accidentally wander onto a firing range that you'd think would be incredibly well marked and away from the boundaries of the fort so that nobody would stray onto it in the first place. (Fort Ord, where the army scenes were filmed, was closed in 1994 and 14000 acres of the place are now part of a national monument, so while I don't know how big the original fort was, it's bigger than that.) Shaeffer's actions nearly get two boys and their dog killed, and should have gotten Shaeffer court-martialled right then and there. But then we wouldn't have a movie. Shaeffer gets one more chance to redeem himself, and because of the type of movie this is, you know he's going to succeed.

There's a lot wrong with The Girl He Left Behind. I've mentioned what I think are a lot of plot holes; reading reviews of people who were in the military, the movie doesn't seem to portray basic training very accurately. Tab Hunter is given the job of playing a very unlikeable character, while Natalie Wood is underused; I'm assuming that Warner Bros. was doing everything they could to keep the two in the public eye together, hence the casting.

The movie doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and doesn't straddle the genres successfully. But I think the biggest thing for me personally was the sense that the part of Hollywood that made this movie really liked the idea of the peacetime draft and just stealing 18 months out of people's lives (something that happened to my father; he spent his time at White Sands keeping the missiles out of the hands of the Ernst Blofelds of the world). I can't imagine anybody getting drafted in peacetime and being OK with the prospect. Then again, even after 40 years we can't get rid of forcing 18-year-old men to register for the draft in the first place.

Maybe somebody out there is going to like The Girl He Left Behind, but I'm not certain who. As always, however, watch and judge for yourself. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.