The film is based on the 1961 novel by Leo Rosten. It was loosely based on the World War II experiences of Rosten's close friend Ralph Greenson, M.D., while Greenson was a captain in the Army Medical Corps supporting the U.S. Army Air Forces and stationed at Yuma Army Airfield in Yuma, Arizona. Greenson is well known for his work on "empathy" and was one of the first in his field to seriously associate posttraumatic stress disorder (years before that terminology was developed) with wartime experiences. He was a director of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and was a practicing Freudian. Greenson is perhaps best known for his patients, who included Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Vivien Leigh.
The story was used as a 1972 television pilot of the same title produced by Danny Thomas Productions starring Jim Hutton in the title role and Joan Van Ark as Lt Corum.[3]
Plot
In 1944, psychiatrist Captain Josiah Newman is head of the neuro-psychiatric Ward 7 at the Colfax Army Air Field (AAF) military hospital, located in the Arizona desert. As Newman explains to a representative from the air surgeon’s office, "We're short of beds, doctors, orderlies, nurses, everything ... except patients." In response to “an alarming increase in neuropsychiatric cases”, Newman uses unconventional methods to treat his patients, including shell-shocked, schizophrenic, and catatonic cases, often previously minimized as military fatigue. At Newman’s insistence, despite resistance from superiors, Colonel Bliss, a “brilliant military tactician,” is evaluated for an underlying medical condition when he displays erratic behavior related to a small social faux pas.
To recruit much needed personnel, Newman hijacks a reluctant, experienced orderly, Corporal Jackson Leibowitz, a wheeler-dealer from New Jersey, who makes even Newman’s unconventional methods look prosaic. Leibowitz promptly has the entire ward participating in a sing-along of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." He purloins supplies and gifts from family of military personnel to give treats to his patients, including stealing Corporal Gavoni’s Christmas salami and chopping off the top of the base’s 20-ft Christmas tree to provide a tree for his ward (the severed treetop was cut with a surgical saw and conveyed furtively on a stretcher in an ambulance).
Newman also courts nurse Lieutenant Francie Corum on what she thinks is a date... until he asks her to transfer to Ward 7. Meanwhile, Colonel Bliss forces his way into Ward 7 looking for Dr. Newman with a 6-inch knife, because Newman blocked his return to active duty after witnessing his erratic behavior. After watching Newman's handling of this situation and other patients on the ward, Corum transfers in. A schizophrenic, Colonel Bliss compulsively repeats commands to a New Guinea squadron he ordered to their doom in combat and speaks in alliteration (“babbling brightly” he is “bored with being beleaguered with brainless benighted blockheads”). As his alter ego, “Mr. Future,” he leaves his medical hearing abruptly and commits suicide to be with his men.
Traumatized Corporal Jim Tompkins, an Eighth Air Force air gunner, who abuses alcohol to deal with a mind shattered by war experiences, is antisocial and a disciplinary problem. Dealing with survivor’s guilt, he resists therapy until his condition becomes unbearable. Administered sodium pentothal, he relives the experience of being shot down in a plane, stumbling his way out of wreck before it blew up, and then finding his best friend dead with his head blown off. After treatment, Thompkins is sent back to active duty, though Newman is later dismayed to receive notice of Thompkins's death in combat.
Captain Paul Winston is catatonic, overwhelmed with guilt for having evaded capture during the German occupation of a town. Trapped and hiding "safely" for 13 months in a cellar went against his unrealistically rigid notions of bravery. Therapy includes advising his unemotional wife, who holds conservative values, on how to reassure him that she loves him, recognizing his bravery and endurance.
Through all these challenges, Francie Corum provides comforting nursing support to the patients, as well as professional and personal support to Newman as they draw closer.
Newman is bedeviled by Colfax AAF's "old-school" base commander, Colonel Pyser, who ultimately saddles him with a complement of 14 ItalianPOWs because his is the only secure ward where they can be held that meets regulations (captured in the Libyan Desert the POWs must be held in a similar climate like Arizona). Colonel Pyser tells Newman they are not to receive therapy: “If they hate their fathers, that’s all right with us.” True to his usual resourcefulness, Leibowitz speaks Italian (“In the neighborhood I came from you had to know six different languages to do business.”) and takes the POWs under his wing. The POWs lend comic relief for the Christmas pageant when Leibowitz teaches “The Caroling Carusos” an “old American Indian song” and they unwittingly sing “Hava Nagila,” to the audience’s amusement and applause.
In addition, a flock of constantly straying sheep (kept for the medical lab) that find their way to the airfield and a set of feuding orderlies keeps life interesting right up to Christmas 1944.
An attempt was made to turn the film into a TV sitcom by Thomas-Crenna Productions, the company of Danny Thomas and Richard Crenna. A pilot was shot in 1972, written by Frank Tarloff. It aired on ABC on August 19, 1972 as part of its unsold pilot anthology, ABC Comedy Showcase.[5][6] The Los Angeles Times said "it was easy to see why it was never sold."[7]
