Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)

Captain Newman, M.D. is about a military psychiatric hospital during WWII. It's a 1960s movie, unlike most of the WWII content I've been consuming that was made during the war, so this one has a lot of space to be sentimental. And Captain Newman, M.D. is mostly that. It's also mostly a comedy...? The film, in fact, opens with a herd of sheep running all around the base. The sheep have no purpose at all within the plot except that they create farcical situations when they escape and they make everyone run around catching them. In a totally absurd sequence late in the movie, sheep are in ambulances, sheep are in taxis, sheep are in pickup trucks. It looks like something from Wallace and Grommit. 

Anyway, the comedy doesn't work in this movie, or rather, I guess it could work if so much of the movie wasn't invested in talking about the psychological effects of the war, but it's the psychological drama stuff that is actually good. The film stars Gregory Peck, Angie Dickinson, and Tony Curtis, but the great roles are given to the patients: Eddie Albert as a psychotic general, Bobby Darin as a depressed and angry plane-crash survivor, and Robert Duvall as a near-catatonic ghost of a man. Bobby Darin, especially, is amazing. His scenes, which are about uncovering what he experienced in a plane crash with an officer he admired, give us no flashbacks at all. Instead, Darin narrates it for us. It's heartbreaking, and he's wonderful. I was skeptical of this movie's comedic tone, and this whole sequence still brought me to tears. All of the Bobby Darin stuff is excellent. The movie might be worth watching just for him.

You can watch Captain Newman, M.D. on YouTube.