No Time for Sergeants

For those of you who know Andy Griffith best as the country wise sheriff of Mayberry or as the slick country lawyer Ben Matlock it might come as a surprise that Griffith got his first big career break playing that most ingenuous of military draftees Will Stockdale in No Time For Sergeants first on Broadway and then in this film version. Griffith is such a hick he makes Gomer Pyle look as sophisticated as Noel Coward.

Stockdale is one of those people who glides through life while chaos erupts all around him. Because his father William Fawcett had kept his draft letters from him, when the Air Force finally does come to get him. The man whom the chaos effects the most is his sergeant at the classification center played by Myron McCormick in the best world weary tradition he can muster.

Stockdale's best friend is Nick Adams, a kid from a military tradition family who wants the Army Infantry and not the Air Force and bemoans his fate through most of the film. He convinces Griffith of the fact that the infantry does the real fighting and everyone else just helps out occasionally. Like many other things Griffith takes them to heart and repeats them verbatim always at the wrong time. It's the heart of the humor in No Time For Sergeants.

No Time For Sergeants ran for 796 performances on Broadway during the 1955-57 season and Griffith, McCormick, Don Knotts, and James Milhollin all repeat their roles from Broadway. This not the Andy Griffith Show is the first time Knotts and Griffith work together. Knotts plays a corporal at the classification center administering the manual dexterity test and how Griffith solves it is Gordian Knot like. But his session with psychiatrist James Millhollin is the funniest thing in the film.

No Time For Sergeants is one of the best military comedies ever done on stage and screen. Do not miss it if broadcast.