Edward G. Robinson was a fine comic actor, but he did not get many opportunities to show it. In his two best known comedies, Talk of the Town and Brother Orchid, he is cast as comic versions of the gangster boss persona he made famous in Little Caesar. His acting is great, but the roles are parodistically broad. Mr. Winkle Goes to War is nothing like that. He plays a sweet and noble little guy. It’s a revelation.
The film is often listed among the better comedies of the ’40s, but there’s almost no commentary on it. It was clearly a morale-boosting project, released in the summer of 1944 not long after D-Day and in the middle of the largely successful naval campaign in the Pacific. But it’s very unlike the jitterbug canteen comedies that were versions of USO shows. Instead of targeting and heroicizing virile young men and troop-supporting young women, it’s for and about the men who were still at home, far from the war — the last group of men, many middle-aged, who could still be impressed into service.
Wilfred Winkle (Robinson) is a mild clerk in a small town bank who resigns from his boring but socially respectable job to set up a fix-it shop. His wife and brother-in-law do not approve. But Winkle joins forces with Barry (Ted Donaldson), a waif from a nearby orphanage, whom Winkle has befriended over the years. Barry is handy, and Winkle teaches him basic mechanics. Winkle’s wife Amy (Ruth Warrick) can’t stop him, but she sets up a physical obstacle by refusing to cut a gate in their back fence so that Barry and Wilfred might easily flow from house to workshop. Then Winkle receives an induction letter and contrary to everyone’s expectations he passes his physical. In training he goes through the usual comic ordeals — though compared with almost any basic training film ever made, it’s pretty nice and friendly. His drill sergeant is a sweet guy. Winkle is assigned to do bookkeeping; he was a bank clerk, after all. The same frustration hits him in the army that hit him at home, and he decides to demand a transfer to a mechanical unit, so that he can fix things, like tanks and stuff. This play between mildness and relentlessness is the comic core of his character.
There’s a nice anti-macho scene when Winkle delivers his request to his commanding officer at a dance. (The music is good, but as usual uncredited.)
In many ways the film plays out the expected cliches about the milquetoast hero. There are very few plot surprises. The pleasure is in watching Robinson — who was known almost exclusively as a little badass — deliver it with elegance. In a nice scene, Winkle’s army buddies send him off on a lark to invite a table of swell dishes to join them.
Naturally, Winkle is sent into combat and acts heroically, unthinkingly saving his buddies by driving a bulldozer into a Japanese machine-gun nest. He returns home to a hero’s welcome — which he modestly deflects. More important, Amy has had a gate cut into the fence so that Barry and Wilfred can now connect home and shop.
The film is sweet, low-key, and innocent. It feels like a relaxed B-picture. It’s Robinson’s elegant performance that makes it worth watching. Oh, and another thing. The film was released a few months before Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero. It’s very unlikely that Sturges knew or cared much about Winkle, but placed side by side the two films seem uncannily connected. They tell the same story in different registers — one modestly patriotic and affectionate, the other so sardonic that one wonders how it got past the censors. Watch the final scenes of the two films together and you could swear Sturges was parodying Mr. Winkle Goes to War. Put the two in a double-bill and see what happens.