No Leave, No Love

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times writes in his review: "Talk about 'escapist' entertainment! Wait until you see 'No Leave, No Love,' at the Capitol. It is really an inducement to escape! And not only does it fail to put up barriers to the wandering interest of the audience, but it even gives evidence that its producers walked out on it, too, from time to time. The first signs of abandonment by its authors are in the progressively wayward script, which goes from pretty bad in the beginning to complete disintegration toward the end. Apparently the task of creating a story about a marine who falls in love with a radio singer was entirely too strenuous for the boys, so they turned the job over to their stenographers and went off to play a game of golf. And apparently the stenographers, unable to come to grips with this intellectual chore, left it up to the director to invent "business" and resigned in utter despair. As a consequence, "No Leave, No Love" starts rambling along about the second reel, when Van Johnson, as the marine hero, turns things over to his pal, Keenan Wynn. And from there on it is mainly a matter of how comical Mr. Wynn can be with little more helpful material than his sense of humor and a big cigar. It must be said to Mr. Wynn's credit—and to the credit of his director, perhaps—that he does pull some fairly funny business in a strictly low-comedy vein, but it is all rather forced and capricious. And it, too, has its saturation points.[5]