Marnies Let's Go woud have been more interesting

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and while TCM has been running war movies all weekend, FXM is really only getting into the holiday tomorrow morning, with four war movies. The one I haven't blogged about is Marines, Let's Go, at 1:15 PM Monday (and again 9:50 AM Tuesday).

Some narration introduces us to our stock character US Marines who are serving in Korea during the war. The five main ones are Pfc. Skip Roth (Tom Tryon); upper-class Pfc. Chatfield (David Hedison); naïve Texan Pvt. Newt Levels (David Brandon); nominal leader Sgt. Hawkins (Peter Miller); and Pfc. McCarthy (Tom Reese), nicknamed "Let's Go" because he's born for combat instead of leadership and constantly exhorts his comrades-in-arms, "Let's go!"

The whole outfit gets leave to go visit Japan at about the same time Pfc. McCarthy is set to get a promotion. Everybody else thinks the promotion is going to be terrible for him, as he's not really suited for command, so Roth spends much of the time in Japan trying to get Let's Go busted back to private. As for Hawkins, he's got the chance to have a real honeymoon with his wife; Newt has a girlfriend who he thinks of as a fiancée, Grace (Linda Hutchings), but as we'll see, she has a past.

Roth wangles a series of hotel rooms in a respectable family hotel by claiming that he and his marines are on a secret spy mission. They uses a field telephone to communicate back and forth, but military intelligence picks up these conversations and realize something is going on, although they're too stupid to figure out exactly what.

Along the way, the Marines get in some drunken fights, while Let's Go runs into three sisters who are the main attraction in a nightclub floor show and also have a sumo-wrestler brother. Let's Go finally figures out what Roth has been doing to him, and uses the wrestler to get revenge on Roth.

The marines finally get caught out and are going to get the courts-martial they so richly deserve (well, not Hawkins, who has been spending leave trying to get that honeymoon suite). But just as they're about to get their due punishment, all leaves are called off as the marines have to go back to fight in Korea, adding a roughly 20-minute epilogue onto the movie.

Marines, Let's Go is frankly a terrible movie, with the only saving grace being the location establishing shots and the fact that FXM ran the print in the proper Cinemascope aspect ratio. These marines are obnoxious (and in Newt's case, preternatuarlly stupid), making John Wayne's Spig Wead from yesterday's The Wings of Angels look like a positively normal person. They didn't just deserve court-martial; frankly a good beating from the wrestler brother would have been in order as well.

On top of that there's the gross cultural stereotypes of the Japanese and the Koreans, one of the marines having a Korean wife. Then they all get back to Korea and the battle scenes are tedious, not helped by what seems stock footage. All in all, there's just so much here that makes Marines, Let's Go not worth a watch.

Marines, Let's Go did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, and is also available for rent on Prime Video.