No Time for Sergeants

Thursday, June 1, was Andy Griffith’s 80^th birthday. I decided to commemorate this day by watching the 1958 film No Time for Sergeants. I first watched this film when I was about 10 years old. At the time I thought Griffith’s hillbilly act was hilarious and was especially amused by the latrine scene where Griffith, as Private Stockdale, causes the toilet seats to “salute” the inspecting colonel.

This film was based on the novel No Time for Sergeants by Georgia writer Mac Hyman. The novel was adopted for Broadway, where Griffith played the part he later recreated for the film.

Mervyn Leroy, a director of note in the 1930s and 40s, directed this film. He was in his final years as a director. This film shows none of the skill Leroy brought to bear on such earlier films as I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Mister Roberts.

Griffith made his film debut in the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd (directed by Elia Kazan), a fascinating film about power, ambition, and the media. Griffith played “Larry ‘Lonesome’ Roads,” a bucolic Southern n’eer-do-well whose good looks and singing talent win him a place as a radio disk jockey and ultimately as a political candidate with national aspirations. Griffith’s performance as a deceptive, ambitious, ruthless individual is nuanced and complex. Ultimately, it becomes too over-wrought, but this first film shows that Griffith had real talent and promise.

In No Time for Sergeants he squanders that talent in a way that may have typecast him and cost him the opportunity to play more varied roles. As Will Stockdale he plays a good-hearted, naïve, uneducated hillbilly who is loyal to his friends and who dislikes bullies. When he is drafted, he goes willingly (even though his father has hidden the draft notices) because he believes serving his country is the right thing to do. He is a combination of Jethro Bodine from The Beverley Hillbillies, L’il Abner from the comic strip, and Huck Finn. He plays a simple but good-hearted bucolic Southerner, uncorrupted, a role that we have seen in any number of films about the South—especially some of the early Elvis films.

The script is poorly written and poorly paced—on a level with the Sergeant Bilko television series. No Time for Sergeants is one of a number of films made in the first two decades after World War II that address a viewing audience of former American GIs still interested in seeing films about the military. Told from the viewpoint of enlisted men, it shows the officers as distant, apathetic, and obsessed with maintaining rank and power.

(Curiously, the barracks where Stockdale and his fellow enlistees stay are integrated—there are several black enlistees living there with the white enlistees—but they are always in the background, always almost out of view. This may be a faint if half-hearted acknowledgement of the civil rights movement then underway).

Stockdale remains uncorrupted throughout this film, wholly unaffected and unenlightened by the experiences he goes through, which include parachuting out of a burning plane into a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb test. Everything in this film is played for laughs, but the humor is weak and strained, at least from 2006 standards. In A Face in the Crowd Griffith’s acting was over the top. Here he just seems to be occupying the role.

In The Andy Griffith Show Griffith played Sheriff Andy Taylor in the quaint and mild North Carolina town of Mayberry. Andy Taylor is considerably more domesticated than Will Stockdale. In Andy Taylor we see another kind of good-hearted, good-natured Southerner--a role that in one form or another Griffith played for most of the rest of his career.