WWII Marathon #11: Never So Few (1959)

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John Sturges' WWII film - a foray from his many beautiful westerns of the mid-50's - is a puzzling, disappointingly spiritless action film that takes nearly 90 minutes to get rolling and once it does, turns into a murky legal war-crime dilemma. 
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Frank Sinatra, with his brown slouch hat and deadly-calm demeanor, plays Captain Reynolds, leading local Kachin warriors against the Japanese in the Burmese jungles. Among his flock are Peter Lawford, Richard Johnson and Dean Jones alongside future Sturges pen-pals Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. 
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After an initial raid (in which Captain Reynolds contentiously takes the lives of one of his own mortally wounded men), he meets the wealthy debonair Nikko Regas (Paul Henreid) and his girlfriend, Carla Vesari (Gina Lollobrigida), which leads to a tireless romantic interlude to the Himalayans, where the film sputters under this nonexistent sexual ardor. 
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Once back in action, Reynolds is ordered to attack a Japanese outpost, but once they stumble upon a ravaged, beaten American convoy, their attentions turn towards a rogue Chinese outpost, where an inconvenient truth is uncovered, that the Chinese are, in fact, raiding and collecting American supplies, killing U.S. soldiers in the process.
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It's here where the film resembles the kind of muddled, insubordinate war films being produced at the time and in the future (The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Devil's Brigade, The Dirty Dozen) which were less concerned with patriotism and more with the injustices of war. 
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Sturges, at this point, had and would go on to make far better films (even better ones about the war, specifically) but Never So Few, while dramatically inert for its majority, does remain an appealing visual treat as it continues Sturges' reputation as a master of the widescreen - even if the results are never quite compelling. [C]