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Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison plays like a lukewarm reheating of The African Queen, with most of the energy and wit comes through the performances of Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum, and not John Huston’s weirdly sleepy direction. Normally a dark wit with a peppy sense of pacing and tone, Huston seems entrapped by the earnestness of this piece, and it’s straight up hokum that needed a slightly trashier take to give it some oomph.
But by this point Huston was an old pro, and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison stills works relatively well. It’s a handsomely made production, it’s just clearly a second or third-tier entry in his work. Much like the superior The African Queen, this film is primarily a two-hander of mismatched would-be lovers; this time around, a soldier and nun trapped on an island in the South Pacific during WWII as Japanese troops slowly encroach upon them.
Where the treatment of this story gets frustrating is in the ways the military and church as institutions requiring complete surrender to their ideologies get only surface-level exploration. The feverish erotic yearnings between the two of them are demurred, and I wonder what a possessed, traumatized catholic could have spun from this material. Huston was too much a rascal to dig deep into this fertile ground, and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison eventually settles into movie star watching.
This still leaves Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison with enough charms to recommend a viewing as Kerr and Mitchum deliver very fine work here. Kerr was a stronger all-around actor than Mitchum, and she fares better here with the thin material. She seemed to excel in roles that demanded her to repress her sexuality, although nothing comes close to ripe hysteria of The Innocents or the slow burn of Black Narcissus. Kerr and Mitchum develop a believable chemistry, and her lady-like charms mesh well with his alpha-male brusqueness.
It’s enjoyable, but lazily rendered with nothing approaching the specificity of the desert in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or the jungles in The African Queen. There are a few great scenes, some enthralling movie star charisma, but Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is more dutiful than anything else. It’s lightweight, it’s fun, but it doesn’t rival any of the canonized masterpieces in Mitchum, Kerr, or Huston’s various bodies of work.
