One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

No one will ever rate The Last Time I Saw Archie as one of Robert Mitchum's greatest films. But it does and Mitchum does have a certain droll quality that makes it passably amusing, at least to me.This is believe it or not a true story based on the memoir of screenwriter William Bowers played here by Jack Webb who produced and directed the film, on another film person, one Arch Hall, Sr. In real life Hall spent several years trying to make his son Arch Hall, Jr. a film star. He in my opinion topped Ed Wood in the making of bad films that starred his son. If what I saw in the film was any indication of what he was in real life, the senior Hall had to be one of the greatest conmen that ever lived to have wheedled out money from people to produce what he did. Such classics as Eegah and The Choppers are on his list of film credits.Mitchum plays Hall and from the day he and Webb join the Army Air Corps, Mitchum displays a genius for conning everybody around. People do need at least one confidante in life and Webb kind of falls into the role. Around the same time there was a British film called On The Fiddle which starred a pre-James Bond Sean Connery and there is a lot of similarity.Any film that has such funny people as Don Knotts, Joe Flynn, Harvey Lembeck,Robert Strauss and Louis Nye is definitely worth a look. None of these guys do their best work in The Last Time I Saw Archie, but still they help moves this film along, especially Lembeck and Strauss as a couple of dimwitted sergeants who are the chief victims of Mitchum's roguish ways. France Nuyen and Martha Hyer nicely decorate the film in the two female roles of size. Production values were lacking, according to Lee Server's definitive book on Robert Mitchum it only had a four week shooting schedule and it looked like it was mostly shot on a television sound stage. Still it does give us a few chuckles.But now after seeing this again for the first time in about 35 years and after seeing some of Arch Hall's work on screen I think there definitely is an Oscar winning film here. Johnny Depp, I hope you read this review.

"Archie" stars all the really great character players from the time period. People whose names you might not know, but who's faces and the voices were quite familiar, make up the Army Air Force unit. Don Knotts had been working on the Andy Griffith show for under two years when this was released so he wasn't as well known as he would later become, Joe Flynn had been in sitcoms since they began later to appear in many Disney movies for kids, while Robert Mitchum was an A List star and Jack Webb had been on radio for 25+ years along with TV's Dragnet before producing and directing series. Webb was the director and producer of "Archie". Of the military comedies, (Francis the Talking Mule, Your in the Army/Navy Now, "Archie" would be one of the best with a decent enough story, fun actors and humorous situations, mostly based on the chiseler (Mitchum's character) and the fall guy (Webb) interacting with each other and a bunch of extremely beautiful girls. Martha Hyer plays Webb's love interest while a gorgeous Vietnamese actress plays Mitchum's steady. Neither of the two girls would appear dated by today's standards, the beauty holds out. And that is the movie, high jinks by Mitchum, as he pulls the wool over the other members in the unit with Sad Sack Webb left holding the bag, and the women. It's fun, a good escape and don't miss the airplane crash with Mitchum running out of runway, you'll die laughing.

That rarest of cinematic animals: A Jack Webb comedy... That is, an INTENTIONAL Jack Webb comedy. In at least one interview Mitchum claimed this was his favorite role, because he "got paid $400,000 in advance". Mitchum plays Archie Hall, a charming con man who's always scamming his army superiors during WW2. Hall was real person, an army buddy of screenwriter William Bowers (played by Webb in his stiffly pseudo-relaxed "Joe Friday takes the weekend off" manner). But Mitchum with his "who gives a damn" attitude isn't really suited to playing a con man -- it's a role that would've suited, say, Tony Curtis better.The supporting cast of character comics -- Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (reunited 8 years after Stalag 17) as knucklehead sergeants, plus Louis Nye, Joe Flynn, and Del Moore as Mitchum's patsies in the platoon -- come off best, even if Nye overacts quite a bit. This may be the best part Moore ever had (and don't give me that Nutty Ptofessor crap -- Moore was wasted as Jerry's stooge). Too bad Moore never got a career-boosting TV gig (the way Flynn did with McHale's Navy), he was a very talented farceur.

As a huge Jack Webb fan and a huge Arch Hall (Sr. & Jr.) fan, I had long awaited the opportunity to see Jack Webb's portrayal of the life of Arch Hall Sr. I was a bit disappointed, though, when I discovered that the movie was a comedy about Arch's army career, not about his production of film greats like `Eegah' and `The Choppers.' This movie doesn't even mention his extensive prewar career making B-Westerns, preferring to imply that he had `no past.'That said, however, Robert Mitchum does an excellent job of portraying Arch, as recollected by his wartime buddy Bill Bowers (adeptly portrayed by Jack Webb himself). According to Ray Dennis Steckler, Mitchum spent time studying the real Arch Hall, learning how to make every move speak of laziness and a drive to get somebody else to do the work. Steckler (who worked with Arch on `Eegah' and `Wild Guitar') says Mitchum did him to a `T.'Bowers clearly romanticized his old friend quite a bit - if the real Arch Hall had been that good at manipulating circumstances to his favor, he would have become a Hollywood powerhouse, not a director of low-budget (if wonderful) schlock films. Nevertheless, watching Mitchum work people as Arch is enormously entertaining. I think this movie would appeal to anybody who has been in the service and dealt with the kind of ludicrous conditions that are familiar there. Mitchum as Arch gets to turn the whole system of controlled chaos to his advantage.It's too bad Don Knotts didn't get more scenes, I started laughing as soon as he appeared on the screen. Everyone in the cast shows excellent comedic sense, and Jack proves (once again) that he was not just the straight man from Dragnet - he was a visionary and talented artist with considerable range.