"Their first full-length motion picture in color!" was the tagline for the poster of McHale's Navy (1964), based on the popular television series that ran from 1962-1966. The series had been created from a 1962 dramatic episode of the Alcoa Premiere anthology series called "Seven Against the Sea" and was turned into comedy by producers Jennings Lang and Edward J. Montagne. The success of the series inspired Universal Pictures to cash in by taking McHale's Navy to the big screen. Since most televisions (and most television production in the early 1960s) were black-and-white, shooting the film in color was a wise move, and so was using the series' stars including Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway, Joe Flynn, Bob Hastings, Gavin MacLeod and Carl Ballantine. Also in the cast were Jean Willes, French singer Claudine Longet (in her film debut) and Sandy Slavik, who had previously worked as a receptionist in the Universal press department.

The plot was inspired by a real-life 1907 event in which a horse thought lost at sea in a shipwreck later turned up on an island in the South Pacific. McHale's Navy takes place on a South Pacific island but in 1943 during the middle of World War II. McHale's crew, serving on PT-73, find themselves in debt to Marines for $2,000 when they bet on a horse race over the radio, which has been time delayed. Desperate to get the money, they go to a casino on New Caledonia where they not only lose but get involved in a fight. They also come upon the wreck of an Australian ship with the famous racehorse Silver Spots. The McHale crew disguise the horse and enter it in a race on New Caledonia.

Produced and directed by Edward J. Montagne from a script by associate producer Si Rose, Frank Gill Jr. and George Carleton Brown, McHale's Navy was rapidly shot in only 22 days, from March 9 - March 31, 1964. Most of the shooting took place on location at Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles and at Universal Studios, since the island set was already standing for use in the series, but production was postponed when Los Angeles was hit by heavy rains in late March 1964, which washed away foliage that had been specifically planted and made exterior filming impossible. Filming also had to be postponed briefly while Ernest Borgnine testified on set as a witness in a lawsuit against Twentieth Century-Fox, an accommodation that the Los Angeles Superior Court normally reserved for witnesses who were physically incapacitated and unable to come to the courthouse. When filming wrapped on March 31, Borgnine immediately left for New York to join his fiancée, singer Ethel Merman, for a week before going back to work on the television series. The Borgnine-Merman marriage would famously last for only 32 days. Things back on the set were equally inharmonious, where Joe Flynn and Borgnine reportedly got into a fistfight, making their joint appearances on the film's promotional tours impossible. Instead, they would take different routes.

McHale's Navy premiered in New Jersey on July 8, 1964, opened in New York City on July 10th and in Los Angeles on August 26th. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote in his review of McHale's Navy that the screening at the RKO 86th Street Theater had been attended by a large audience made up primarily of teenagers who cheered "[w]ith an uproar of squealing and hand-clapping that would have done justice to the arrival of Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton in a new comedy back in the old days." While the film stuck to the conventions set in the series, the audience ate it up. "When Ernest Borgnine as the barrel-shaped, frog-throated commander of PT-73 first hove into view on the bridge-deck of his tiny South Pacific craft, racing straight toward the audience, they hollered. Every time his clumsy second in command, Tim Conway, bumped his head or fired his pistol or dropped eggs in the hat of the captain, Joe Flynn, as he seems to have a hopeless way of doing, they screamed with supremely fulfilled joy. [...] There's no questioning the loyalty of those video fans who will pay to see their favorites transposed to the movies. There's only a question of their taste."

SOURCES:

AFI|Catalog
Screen: 'McHale's Navy,' TV Fidelis:Borgnine Stars in Film Adapted From Video. (1964, July11). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/11/archives/screen-mchales-navy-tv-fidelisborgnine-stars-in-film-adapted-from.html

By Lorraine LoBianco