What's worse, the commanding officer is a petty Merchant Marine who got in the Navy because they needed anyone they could get, and he resents Mister Roberts and anyone else who he thinks looks down on him. Anyway, Mister Roberts is a college-grad who felt a duty to be involved in WWII, but who had the bad luck to be assigned to a cargo ship that is never involved in combat duty. There is an outstanding photo of these five actors singing together accompanied by Cagney's guitar in the photo gallery. The story of "Mister Roberts" is a bit melodramatic for my taste - after all, it started out on Broadway - but it doesn't matter because you have five huge headliners to carry it, all at different stages of their careers - William Powell in his last feature film James Cagney, James Fonda, and Ward Bond in their mid-career phases (though Bond would be cut down too young in 1960) and Jack Lemmon in practically his first movie. For one small example, I'd never noticed the detail of the warships passing by during the opening credits before. Well, even on a movie screen, I think some of the scenes had to be chopped (or Mervyn LeRoy just liked including William Powell's shoe in a screen-shot, but not the rest of him) but I enjoyed this movie much more in a theater than on a TV screen. The latter is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I've always had reservations about "Mister Roberts", in large part, I think, because I'd always seen it in pan-and-scan on AMC instead of the original CinemaScope perspective of the original. I recently saw "Mister Roberts" for the first time in a theater, part of a double-bill with "Twelve Angry Men".
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