Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

MartinHafer You've gotta feel sorry for Harry (Paul Newman) in "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!". His wife (Joanne Woodward) is ALWAYS busy with committees and projects and never has time for him. No sooner does he convince her to take out some time so they can go off to a romantic hotel than she agrees to head up yet another committee--one to fight a new army base coming to town! This time, she not only agrees to be the head but volunteers Harry for it as well! All Harry wants is to be with his wife....alone! At the same time, a VERY sexy neighbor (Joan Collins) is suffering from the same problem with her husband--a man who is practically never home. However, she deals with it very differently--she decides she wants Harry! And, she'll do ANYTHING to get him--even ruin his marriage. For a 1950s film, "Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!" is an amazingly sexual film. Think about it--the premise is that Harry is very sexually frustrated through no fault of his own! And, again and again, his libido is unfulfilled.So is this little comedy worth seeing? Yes. However, just because it has Newman and Woodward does NOT mean it's a great film--which it isn't. The film suffers from two main problems--the unfulfilled libido and the marital problems in Harry's marriage do seem to go on a bit too long. Additionally, I found it difficult to enjoy at times because Woodward's character is really difficult to like. Plus, towards the end it all just degenerates into a bit of a mess. Still, it's a cute film and a decent way to spend 106 minutes of your life provided your expectations are not especially high.By the way, the pageant about Pocahontas was perhaps even more insanely inaccurate than the Disney film. Imagine--Pocahontas greeting the Pilgrims lead by John Smith at Plymouth!! Firecrackers! Crazy.

masercot I read the reviews before watching it again after many years. Shocked, I was, to see that they weren't good. My plan was to see the movie and mount a spirited defense of it on this very site.I can't. I like romantic comedies. I like comedies from this era. I even like bad movies if they are sincere. This movie just makes me uncomfortable.Paul Newman, never one of my favorites, but a pretty decent actor, has no real range or depth in this role. I watched, expecting him to suddenly step forward and take charge of the movie, but he disappointed me...Joanne Woodward vacillates between stern wife and mother/retarded blonde. I think she was trying to be sexy, but came off as possibly addicted to Valium...Joan Collins was the one bright spot in this movie. She was sexy and vivacious...even funny from time to time...Gale Gordon (Mr. Mooney from the old Lucy Show) did okay with what he had.What they managed to do with some pretty talented actors was to create a movie where not only did I not care about the lives of any of the characters, I don't think I would've cared if any of them had been tortured to death, either.

theowinthrop I find that occasionally I recall the time I first watched a film with better clarity than the film itself. I wish this was one of them. RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! apparently came from a very funny book by Max Shulman, but that I'd expect. From what I've read in the other comments the novel's framework seems to have been kept, but Shulman's witty barbs thrown out. This is frequently the case with Hollywood treatments of good books (i.e.: even if you liked Robert Redford's version of THE GREAT GATSBY, it and the previous one with Alan Ladd can't match Fitzgerald's terrific novel). I first saw this film (I've seen it two times, strangely enough) when it was shown about 1962 or 1963 on Saturday NIGHT AT THE MOVIES on television. Paul Newman was at the then height of his early film career as one of the best of the "Young Turk" breed of actors with Brando and Clift. But while doing well with dramas (SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME, THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, HUD, THE HUSTLER, HOMBRE) he failed to register any real success as a comic actor. In the long run it did not matter (it was just the choice of material). Films like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, THE STING, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, SLAP SHOT) all eventually showed he did have a mastery of comedy - but not bedroom farce. Leave that to his contemporary Rock Hudson. Actually I think Newman's first successful comic part (he was not the star of the whole film) was as the second doomed husband (the painter) in Shirley MacLaine's WHAT A WAY TO GO.RALLY, 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS! like his other early doomed comedy, A NEW KIND OF LOVE, co-starred his wife Joanne Woodward. Both appeared together (to better advantage) in the more dramatic THE LONG HOT SUMMER, which did have some normal comic sections that Newman did well with Woodward and Orson Welles and Tony Franciosa. But that film blended comedy and drama, and the comic sections emphasized the conniving spirit of Newman's character Ben. Here he is a business executive returning to Putnam's Landing, Connecticut daily from his job in Manhattan. While such a position is not impossible to see Newman in, it is not handled as a similar situation was for Rock Hudson in his last Doris Day romp, SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Hudson's business executive went home with next-door-neighbor Tony Randall, and manages to depress the ebullient Randall with dire personal news. With Newman one imagines he just reads the New York Times on the way home. Woodward is there of course (as Doris was for Rock), but while one sees the sparks of personal chemistry between them, they don't translate to the humor that just sparkled between Doris and Rock on screen.The plots in the movie are three: the trouble of the community regarding a new military base (connected, as it turns out, to the space program) being built near their town; the rocky personal relationship between married Paul and Joanne - especially as local rich witch (what else would she be?) Joan Collins thrown in; and the romance of young Tuesday Wells with Dwayne Hickman, who finds the competition rising - as do his fellow civilian teenage jocks - from the local military looking for relaxation on weekends. Joanne becomes the leading, anti-base spokesperson. She is confronted by base commander Gale Gordon, and his assistant Jack Carson. Given this set-up the viewer knows who is more likely to win.Of the scenes I recall best, Collins and Carson did the most with material. Collins, of course, is an attractive woman (and here she was fantastic to look at), and one shot I recall when she and her target Newman are drinking and dancing together is of them bumping (possibly on purpose by her) derrières. She certainly brought spice into her scenes. Carson did what he could. Only a year before he gave one of his most dramatic performances in THE TARNISHED ANGELS with Hudson, Dorothy Malone, and Robert Stack, and in 1958 he would do yeoman work as Newman's bitter brother Goober in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, but the material there (Faulkner's PYLON and Tennessee Williams' CAT) helped him. Here he is a put-upon middle man taking orders barked out by Gordon and trying to restrain angry impulses of his own towards the townspeople. Yet he did do well, especially in two sequences which were relatively simple: the Thanksgiving pageant (where he keeps slipping on a wet rock supposedly representing Plymouth Rock), and the final shot where he is outsmarted by somebody who shouldn't have outsmarted him. The Thanksgiving pageant has it's moments, with Hickman (as an Indian) leading his fellow "Indians" onto the oncoming "Pilgrims" (the soldiers from the base). And there is also the apparently unheralded capsizing of "the Mayflower", all to the amazement of pageant coordinator and narrator Woodward. Unfortunately even this suffers from comparison to other films. Think of the Thanksgiving pageant in ADDAMS FAMILY VALUES where Wednesday releases tensions at her school by giving the actors playing the Pilgrims a "grim" view of what happened to the Native Americans in the U.S. due to the arrival of the Europeans. She was far more eloquent, and one sympathized with the point of view (even if descended from those Europeans). Somehow that seemed more relevant for consideration in such a situation than whether quiet Putnam's Landing should accept the missile base next to it.So, for the sake of the comic (and sexy) bits I liked, I will give this film a "6" rather than anything higher. Without those it would have been lower.

Fred Sliman (fs3) In other of Paul Newman's movie years, this one might have fared better, but alongside the Southern masterpieces Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Long Hot Summer, and the flawed but interesting Billy The Kid take The Left-Handed Gun, this sometimes amusing fluff just can't hold up. Good to see him paired with Woodward and taking a stab at screen comedy for the first time, but he never truly excelled at it until later in his career. Still, some nice bits and decent work survive. It's just impossible to see and compare these days, rarely if ever broadcast and unreleased to video to this day.