With some of Burt Lancaster's coaching before his screen test, Chuck Connors was cast as his friend in South Sea Woman (1953).
Odd for any Hollywood movie, the colonel who is the head of the court martial wears a USMC Distinguished Marksman rifle badge. This is somewhat interesting in that the distinguished badges are rare and rather difficult to earn. In fact there have been little more than a couple thousand actual rifle distinguished badges awarded to Marines since the first ones around 1903.
Chuck Connors, the actor known as The Rifleman (1958) for five years from 1958 to 1963, had served four years in the Army before playing center for the Boston Celtics in the 1946-47 season, but he left early for spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers. As a basketball player, he was the first NBA player to shatter a backboard, doing so during a pre-game warm-up in the Boston Garden.
But baseball had always been his first love, so, for the next several years, he knocked about the minor leagues mainly in the Eastern U.S, finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949. But after just five weeks and one at-bat, he returned to Montreal. After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, he wound up with their Triple-A farm team, the L.A. Angels, in 1952.
A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Connors and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952) where he played a captain in the state police.
But baseball had always been his first love, so, for the next several years, he knocked about the minor leagues mainly in the Eastern U.S, finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949. But after just five weeks and one at-bat, he returned to Montreal. After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, he wound up with their Triple-A farm team, the L.A. Angels, in 1952.
A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Connors and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952) where he played a captain in the state police.
In the cast are included Arthur Shields as a retired sailor and Strother Martin in an early bit as a courtroom spectator.
The Japanese landing craft are actually American craft of the type used at Normandy and elsewhere. The front of the two types of boat are shaped differently.