During the 1950s, the comedy team of Tommy Noonan and Peter Marshall enjoyed a very mild degree of success on the nightclub circuit and in television appearances. They turned up briefly in the 1951 revue film “Starlift,” but A-list stardom eluded them and the pair spent much of the decade working separately.
In 1959, 20th Century Fox hired the team to star in a series of low-budget comedies. Their first effort was “The Rookie,” an Army comedy – and that subject was no great surprise considering two other comedy teams, Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis, used Army comedies to launch their respective box-office reigns. Noonan took on producing duties for “The Rookies” and co-wrote the script with George O’Hanlon, who was best known at the time as the star of the Joe McDoakes series of comedy shorts. O’Hanlon also directed the film, marking his first time working in that capacity.
In “The Rookie,” Noonan is a bumbling page at a radio station who receives his draft induction notice on the day that World War II ends. He insists on serving in the Army even though the military is winding down from the conflict. He winds up at a decommissioned stateside military facility that is being kept open just to accommodate his basic training, with the entire staff kept on duty for Noonan’s sake.
Marshall is the sergeant who is angry he has to stay in the Army – he was ready to marry Lili Marlene, his movie starlet girlfriend. Lili’s publicist cooks up a stunt to have Lili fall in love with Noonan and offer to marry him – and, naturally, Marshall is aghast over this. Through significantly contrived circumstances, Noonan, Marshall and Lili wind up stranded on a Pacific island with a pair of Japanese soldiers who don’t realize the war is over.
The kindest thing that one can say about “The Rookie” is that this is the type of movie best seen with one’s finger firmly on the fast-forward button. Whatever chemistry Noonan and Marshall may have possessed in their nightclub and television appearances cannot be found in this rickety nonsense, which tries to hard to duplicate the Martin and Lewis formula with over-hectic Noonan as a hapless Lewis-type and a charisma-free Marshall doing Martin-style a straight man routine, complete with breaking into a forgettable song.
In fairness, the one time that Noonan and Marshall generate laughs is when they play the Japanese soldiers, complete with awful yellowface make-up and “ah-so” broken English. Yes, it is extremely politically incorrect, but it is stupid-funny and offers an unexpected detour into genial idiocy that is lacking throughout the film’s painfully predictable humor.
The only true saving grace in “The Rookie” is the beautiful Julie Newmar as Lili. She was the type of actress who was always better than her material, and her presence offers much-needed distraction. Pioneering late-night TV comic Jerry Lester circles Newmar manically as her publicist, trying his hardest to steal scenes, while Joe Besser turns up in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
“The Rookie” was shot in dull black-and-white on a paltry $158,000 budget, and the cheapness is magnified by the CinemaScope presentation. Despite unsympathetic reviews, the film made a profit. The studio assigned Noonan and Marshall to a larger budgeted color film originally called “Double Trouble” and then reshot with musical acts (including Ray Charles) and released in 1961 as “Swingin’ Along.” That film bombed and the team broke up, with Noonan directing and writing the cult films “Promises! Promises!” (1963) and “3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt” (1964) before dying in 1968 following an operation to remove a brain tumor. Marshall focused on musical comedy theater before snagging the hosting job on the game show “Hollywood Squares.”
As for “The Rookie”…well, you have been warned: