No Time for Sergeants
Encyclopedia
No Time for Sergeants is a 1954 best-selling novel by Mac Hyman
Mac Hyman
Mac Hyman , was an American fiction writer whose best-selling comic novel No Time for Sergeants was adapted into a popular Broadway play and a motion picture.- Early life and service :...

, which was later adapted into a teleplay on The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour is an anthology series which brought hour-long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation....

, a popular Broadway play and 1958 motion picture
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, as well as a 1964 television series
Television program
A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...

. The book chronicles the misadventures of a country bumpkin named Will Stockdale who is drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 and assigned to the United States Army Air Force. Hyman was in the Army Air Forces during World War II when it was part of the US Army.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Ira Levin
Ira Levin
Ira Levin was an American author, dramatist and songwriter.-Professional life:Levin attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa...

 adapted Hyman's novel for a one hour teleplay
Teleplay
A teleplay is a television play, a comedy or drama written or adapted for television. The term surfaced during the 1950s with wide usage to distinguish a television plays from stage plays for the theater and screenplays written for films...

 that appeared as an episode on The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour is an anthology series which brought hour-long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation....

television series in 1955. An expanded version of the play debuted on Broadway later that year. In 1958, a film version was released.

Television adaptation (1955)

Ira Levin
Ira Levin
Ira Levin was an American author, dramatist and songwriter.-Professional life:Levin attended Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa...

's adaptation of the novel appeared live on 15 March, 1955, on The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour
The United States Steel Hour is an anthology series which brought hour-long dramas to television from 1953 to 1963. The television series and the radio program that preceded it were both sponsored by the United States Steel Corporation....

, a television anthology series.. It starred Andy Griffith
Andy Griffith
Andy Samuel Griffith is an American actor, director, producer, Grammy Award-winning Southern-gospel singer, and writer. He gained prominence in the starring role in director Elia Kazan's epic film A Face in the Crowd before he became better known for his television roles, playing the lead...

 as Will Stockdale, Myron McCormick
Myron McCormick
Myron McCormick was an American actor of stage, radio and film.McCormick was born as Walter Myron McCormick in Albany, Indiana....

 as his nemesis and inadvertent mentor Sergeant Orville King, Robert Emhardt
Robert Emhardt
Robert Emhardt was an American stage, film, and television actor. He typically played villains.Emhardt studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He began his Broadway career as an understudy for the equally heavyset Sidney Greenstreet in the 1930s, with his actual stage debut...

, Eddie Le Roy, and Alexander Clark
Alexander Clark
Alexander Clark was an African-American diplomat who served as United States Ambassador to Liberia. He was born in 1826 in Pennsylvania to parents who had been freed from slavery...

. The kinescope
Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor...

 recording of the broadcast is available.

Broadway play

An expanded version of the play opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre on October 20, 1955, produced by Maurice Evans
Maurice Evans (actor)
Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. In terms of his screen roles, he is probably best known as Dr...

 and directed by Morton DaCosta
Morton DaCosta
Morton DaCosta was an American theatre and film director, film producer, writer, and actor.-Career:Born Morton Tecosky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, DaCosta began his career as an actor in the Broadway production of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth starring Tallulah Bankhead in 1942...

. Griffith and McCormick reprised their roles, and Don Knotts
Don Knotts
Jesse Donald "Don" Knotts was an American comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, a role which earned him five Emmy Awards...

 made his Broadway debut as Corporal Manual Dexterity. Scenic designer Peter Larkin won a Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...

 in 1956, and Andy Griffith was nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actor. The play ran for a total of 796 performances, closing on September 14, 1957.

Motion picture

See No Time for Sergeants (1958 film)
No Time for Sergeants (1958 film)
No Time for Sergeants is a 1958 American comedy film directed by Mervyn LeRoy starring Andy Griffith and featuring Myron McCormick, Don Knotts and most of the original Broadway cast. Warner Brothers contract player Nick Adams joined the cast as Stockdale's fellow military draftee Benjamin B....



No Time for Sergeants was filmed and released by Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

 in 1958. The film was directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director, producer and sometime actor.-Early life:Born to Jewish parents in San Francisco, California, his family was financially ruined by the 1906 earthquake...

 and starred Griffith, McCormick, Knotts, and most of the rest of the original Broadway cast. Warner Brothers contract stars Nick Adams  as Stockdale's fellow draftee Benjamin B. Whitledge and Murray Hamilton
Murray Hamilton
Murray Hamilton was an American stage, screen, and television actor who appeared in such memorable films as The Hustler, The Graduate and Jaws.-Early life:...

 as Irving S. Blanchard joined the cast.

Television series

No Time for Sergeants came to the small screen in the fall of 1964. It starred Sammy Jackson
Sammy Jackson
Sammy Jackson was an American actor known particularly for his roles reflecting rural life and a country music disc jockey, although he also played pop-standards during 1983 at Los Angeles's KMPC.-Biography and persona:...

 who had had one line in the film version.
When Jackson read that Warner Brothers was going to produce a television sitcom version of No Time for Sergeants for ABC
American Broadcasting Company
The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 he wrote directly to Jack Warner
Jack Warner
Jack Leonard "J. L." Warner , born Jacob Warner in London, Ontario, was a Canadian American film executive who was the president and driving force behind the Warner Bros. Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California...

 saying that he was the best choice for the role and asked Warner to watch a certain episode of the series Maverick
Maverick (TV series)
Maverick is a western television series with comedic overtones created by Roy Huggins. The show ran from September 22, 1957 to July 8, 1962 on ABC and stars James Garner as Bret Maverick, a cagey, articulate cardsharp. Eight episodes into the first season, he was joined by Jack Kelly as his brother...

as proof. Ten days later Jackson was told to come to the studio to test for the role. Jackson won the role over several actors including the better known Will Hutchins
Will Hutchins
Will Hutchins is an American actor most noted for playing the lead role of the young lawyer Tom Brewster in the Warner Brothers Western television series Sugarfoot on ABC from 1957-1961.-Biography:...

, a Warner Brothers Television contract star who formerly played the sympathetic Sugarfoot
Sugarfoot
Sugarfoot is the title of a TV western that aired from 1957 to 1961. The series featured Will Hutchins as fledgling frontier lawyer Tom Brewster and Jack Elam as sidekick Toothy Thompson...

and had also been in the No Time for Sergeants film.

Unlike Jim Nabors
Jim Nabors
James Thurston "Jim" Nabors is an American actor and singer. Born and raised in Sylacauga, Alabama, Nabors moved to Southern California because of his asthma. While working at a Santa Monica nightclub, The Horn, he was discovered by Andy Griffith and later joined The Andy Griffith Show, playing...

' Gomer Pyle
Gomer Pyle
Gomer Pyle is a bubbly, gentle, rural auto mechanic character played by American singer/ television actor Jim Nabors. Gomer Pyle became a character on the TV sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, when actor Howard McNear, who played Floyd the barber, suffered a stroke and took a respite from acting. Jim...

(of the Andy Griffith Show spin off of the same name, inspired by No Time for Sergeants), Jackson's Stockdale was no idiot; rather he had an unlimited amount of common sense
Common sense
Common sense is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts." Thus, "common sense" equates to the knowledge and experience which most people already have, or which the person using the term believes that they do or should have...

, which was displayed in various episodes.
  • His knowledge of farming leads him to give a better image interpretation analysis of an aerial photograph than Air Force Intelligence.
  • The Air Force attempts to demonstrate the efficiency of its survival training by pitting an Air Force survival trained group against an untrained group including Stockdale in the wilderness. Stockdale, with his backwoods knowledge, takes charge and gives his party a comfortable time similar to being in a resort, while the trained group barely survives.
  • Stockdale accepts kitchen details as challenges rather than punishments and impresses the mess sergeant by how well he cleans the mess.
  • Stockdale demonstrates another more appealing quality over Gomer Pyle when he unflinchingly takes punches to his stomach from a bully with a smile and a good natured lecture to his assailant until Stockdale ends his lecture by knocking the bully through a window.


The series had an unusual episode, Two Aces in a Hole, which "channeled" the 1964's films Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe
Fail-Safe (1964 film)
Fail-Safe is a 1964 film directed by Sidney Lumet, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. It tells the story of a fictional Cold War nuclear crisis...

(displaying nuclear destruction wrought by the US Air Force) combined with the black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...

 hypnosis of The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)
The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 American Cold War political thriller film starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury, and featuring Henry Silva, James Gregory, Leslie Parrish and John McGiver...

. Stockdale and his friend Ben witness a stage hypnotist's show (played by Pat Collins "The Hip Hypnotist") from backstage and are accidentally hypnotized to respond to code words that will turn them into World War II bomber pilots or revert them to their own selves. Under the effects of hypnosis
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is "a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination."It is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment . It is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary...

, the two airmen appropriate a bomber loaded with weapons, with which they attempt to nuke the now-friendly Germans.

Part of the William T. Orr
William T. Orr
William T. Orr was an American television producer associated with a series of western and detective programs of the 1950s-1970s....

-produced stable of Warner Brothers Television programs, the series was produced by George Burns
George Burns
George Burns , born Nathan Birnbaum, was an American comedian, actor, and writer.He was one of the few entertainers whose career successfully spanned vaudeville, film, radio, television and movies, with and without his wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow and cigar smoke punctuation became...

's production company. It preceded Burns' own Wendy and Me
Wendy and Me
Wendy and Me is an American sitcom that aired on ABC during the 1964–1965 television season, primarily sponsored by Consolidated Cigar's "El Producto"...

sitcom (which starred Burns and Connie Stevens
Connie Stevens
Connie Stevens is an American actress and singer, best known for her roles in the television series Hawaiian Eye and other TV and film work.-Early life:...

) on ABC's Monday night schedule. But, opposite The Andy Griffith Show
The Andy Griffith Show
The Andy Griffith Show is an American sitcom first televised by CBS between October 3, 1960, and April 1, 1968. Andy Griffith portrays a widowed sheriff in the fictional small community of Mayberry, North Carolina...

, the series headlined by the original star of all the earlier versions of No Time For Sergeants, it was trounced in the ratings and only lasted one season. It was also shown in the UK on ITV
ITV
ITV is the major commercial public service TV network in the United Kingdom. Launched in 1955 under the auspices of the Independent Television Authority to provide competition to the BBC, it is also the oldest commercial network in the UK...

 from 1965 to 1969.

Comics

A Dell
Dell Comics
Dell Comics was the comic book publishing arm of Dell Publishing, which got its start in pulp magazines. It published comics from 1929 to 1973. At its peak, it was the most prominent and successful American company in the medium...

 Four Color
Four Color
Four Color, also known as Four Color Comics and One Shots, was a long-running American comic book anthology series published by Dell Comics between 1939 and 1962...

 Issue 914 comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 version of this story, illustrated by Alex Toth
Alex Toth
Alexander Toth was an American professional cartoonist active from the 1940s through the 1980s. Toth's work began in the American comic book industry, but is known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His work included Super Friends, Space Ghost, The...

 and published in July, 1958, follows the movie's narrative. Three follow up issues in the 1960s tied-in to the short-lived TV series that starred Sammy Jackson.
Greg Theakston
Greg Theakston
Greg Allen Theakston is an American comics artist and illustrator who has worked for numerous publishers. In addition to his many contributions to books and magazines, he is known for developing the Theakstonizing process used in comics restoration. He has used the pseudonym Earl P...

's Pure Imagination released The Alex Toth Reader, v2 in 2005. The art has been painstakingly reproduced from the originals by a process that has been come to be known as Theakstonization, a process by which the original comics have the color leached out, leaving only the black and white line art, which is then reproduced to appear exactly as it did at the time of original publication. One of the stories offered is the original movie adaptation.

External links

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