Heaven Knows Mr. Allison
by John Huston
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Actor: Deborah Kerr, Robert MitchumDirector: John Huston
Brand: MITCHUM,ROBERT
Cinematographer: Oswald Morris
Writer: John Huston
Editor: Russell Lloyd
Producer: Buddy Adler
Producer: Eugene Frenke
Writer: Charles Shaw
Writer: John Lee Mahin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Japanese (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 108 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-05-20
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Fox Home Entertainment
DVD Reviews of Heaven Knows Mr. Allison
DVD Review: Perhaps My Favorite Movie Of All Time.
Summary: 5 Stars
Now what makes this movie so great?
Sure, John Huston is a great director. And sure Robert Mitchum is a good actor. But I'll tell you in two words what makes this movie superb ... Deborah Kerr.
Robert Mitchum is good but Deborah Kerr carries the movie. She's in virtually every scene and yet I doubt if anyone in the audience get tired of "observing her."
She was also directed by John Huston in "Night of the Iguana" and she, quite simply, stole the movie from all the other actors -- Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Sue Lyons.
It's a shame that she wasn't in more quality movies. Or that she wasn't directed in more movies by John Huston. I have the feeling that macho types such as John Huston and Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton respected her as "a grand dame." A ballsy gal.
The brillance of this movie is not just casting her one-on-one with Robert Mitchum but making her a nun. The sexual subtext of this movie is fascinating, especially given that it was made back in the 1950s. If it was made even a few years later in the 1960s, when films began to become more sexually liberated, it wouldn't have carried the same electric charge that it does as a '50s movie.
Some famous director, I don't recall his name, perhaps it was Alfred Hitchcock, said that if a movie is good you should be able to understand and appreciate it with the sound turned off. In other words, the visual images alone should tell you what's going on with the characters.
Take Robert Mitchum. As the movie opens, he "evolves" before our very eyes. He emerges from the ocean: slick, prehistoric, serpentine. He then becomes an upright biped, and finally thinking, calculating man, his primary concern being self-preservation.
He's come right out of Thomas Hobbes' or perhaps Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "state of nature."
The first thing he sees is the first institution of a civilized society -- a church.
Whereupon he sees -- a woman. Wrapped in the *intent* of society's first institution. And that intention, the intention of the church, the intention of religion, is, for better or for worse, to tame and otherwise sublimate that which has crawled -- free, natural and wild -- from the sea onto land: homo erectus.
From that point on, the entire movie revolves around an obvious, irresistible, undeniable question -- How does homo erectus (Robert Mitchum) survive on an island, a perilous island, with someone who, in all respects, is his polar opposite.
Deborah the Nun is peaceful, nonviolent. Robert the Marine is violent, warline.
Deborah the Nun is pure, chaste. Robert the Marine is not.
Alone, Deborah the Nun would probably either perish or else surrender to the Japanese. Robert the Marine would rather die than surrender.
That at a certain point in the movie it becomes clear to the audience that were not that Deborah Kerr is a nun, this would be an absolutely ideal "marriage" -- with or without the legality of a mariage license. Meaning: by the end of the movie it's obvious that the most *natural* thing in the world is for Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum to sexually consummate their relationship. Except of course all through the movie we know just as surely that that will *never* happen. The polarity of the magnets reversed, the closer Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum get to each other, the farther the categorical imperative requires them to move away from each other.
This is an almost ideal structure for a visual medium.
Add to this the fact that John Huston was working with not just two great actors but also two actors who excelled at communicating *nonverbally.* Robert Mitchum's physiognomy and Deborah Kerr's physiognomy are perfect for this movie. It could just as easily been a solent movie and it would have been as powerful.
I read a book a while ago of various interviews John Huston has given over the years and what he always comes back to is the importance of "proper casting." If you get the casting right, he maintains, you're more than half the way home. And this movie is a perfect example of that.
A few years before "Heaven Knows Mister Allison" was made, "The African Queen," also directed by John Huston, tried to do the same reversal-of-polarities with Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in the leads. But, for me, it just didn't work. What makes "Heaven Knows Mister Allison" a better movie, for me at least, is that I can imagine what Deborah Kerr -- as a nun, mind you -- would be like in the throes of sexual excitement, that being the omnipresent subtext in "Heaven Knows Mister Allison," whereas Katherine Hepburn in "The African Queen," also playing a messnger of God, a missionary, just doesn't do it for me. Her getting it on with Humphrey Bogart would just make me laugh. Sort of like watching your grandparents have sex.
If Bogart in "The African Queen" strips to the waist (I can't recall if he actually did, I don't think so), what you register is a guy 52 years old (his actual age when the movie was made, Robert Mitchum I believe was about 37 years old), somewhat pale, soon to die of lung cancer, and anything but virile, serpentine and sensual.
So this is a case of the sequel, "Heaven Knows Mister Alllison," being, at least to my way of thinking not just a better movie but also a movie that actually accomplished what "The African Queen" set out to accomplish but didn't.
Huphrey Bogart is what I would call an "indoor actor." Robert Mitchum is an "outdoor actor." (Their first names alone reinforce that image.)
Katherine Hepburn is what in Texas they would call " all hat but no cowboy." I don't see Katherine Hepburn as sexual in any way. She's asexual. Which is fine if you're making a documentary. But if a filmmaker is trying to tell a story that features a man and a woman .. and one of them is asexual .. then you have a problem.
Actually I think this is one reason why Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn movies were so popular. They were *both* asexual! As such, they were kind of a freak show, for wont of a better description.
You can't tell me that you actually could envision Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn doing the nasty, whether as characters in a movie or else in real life. Whereas Deborah Kerr -- say in "Heaven Knows Mister Allison" or "Night of the Iguana" or "An Affair to Remember" -- is sexually intriguing, wouldn't you agree? In a way that Katherine Hepburn can't even get near to!
What, after all, is Cary Grant trying to accomplish in "An Affair to Remember" other than to get Deborah Kerr in a prehistoric, pre-civilized, pre-religious, *sexual* situation.
Even the fact that one of them is crippled doesn't take away from that thought in the audience's mind.
Here's the ultimate test. Put Katherine Hepburn in "Heaven Knows Mister Allison" instead of Deborah Kerr. Does that work for you? For me it spoils the entire movie, big time. What you believe without question throughout "Heaven Knows Mister Allison" is that somewhere in the back of Robert Mitchum's mind he's wondering what Deborah Kerr would be like as a lover.
That's what the movie is all about. That dynamic is so strong and yet it's simply and effortlessly portrayed. One gets the feeeling that once cast, Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr could have ad-libbed the entire movie!
Personally, I can't think of any other movie that creates such a compelling dynamic between a man and a women; and in such a economical, minimalist way.
Description of Heaven Knows Mr. Allison
No Description Available.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 20-MAY-2003
Media Type: DVD
If a war movie can be lovely, this is it. John Huston directed this touching World War II story about a Marine (Robert Mitchum) stranded with a nun (Deborah Kerr) on a Pacific island overrun by Japanese. After initial antagonism, the resulting kinship between the two characters is human and civil, even after Mitchum's grunt understandably falls in love with his unlikely companion. The action scenes, in which the pair works together to stay ahead of the enemy, are first-rate. The actors have never been better, and Huston's perennial theme about destiny's denial of our dreams is achingly clear in this essentially two-person drama. --Tom Keogh
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