Badger the Botcher
Lieutenant Commander Robert Badger (Kenneth More - The Longest Day) is without a doubt a good naval officer, the trouble is he always speaks the truth and some times those he is speaking it to don't want to hear it. It is how he ends up being transferred from service aboard a ship to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth to help in instructing the new recruits. Unfortunately one of the recruits, Dewberry (Jeremy Lloyd), happens to be the son of a prominent Member of Parliament who given half a chance would like to terminate the Navy and when some thing Badger says gets back to him it unsurprisingly puts him in deep trouble with the top brass. It is how he and a trio of Midshipmen end up in an exchange program with the United States navy.
Let me tell you about some of the things you will find in "We Joined the Navy" one shipman chased by the Admiral's dog climbs over the side of the boat and spanks the dog with a paintbrush. We also get another man flirting with a female Lt. I could go on but I reckon you get the gist as to the sort of comedy which fills this movie as of course there is some chaos and more flirting along the way as we follow the accident prone, chaos causing Brits aboard a US ship. And some of it genuinely amusing, from Sid James briefly appearing as a dancing instructor to Dirk Bogarde making a brief cameo in a familiar character for him.
The trouble is that relatively quickly "We Joined the Navy" gets in to a routine as Badger and his men keep on getting in to trouble whilst Badger flirts with Lt. Blair. And then it is just a case of more and more of the same which I can't deny ends up becoming repetitive and tedious. To put this as simply as I can; what you get in "We Joined the Navy" you will have seen in countless other British comedies of the era with some of the same cast but it is done better in those other comedies.
What this all boils down to is that "We Joined the Navy" is just a typical British comedy from the 1960s and with it featuring a few American actors it was probably made with the intention to see if the British sense of humour would work for an American audience.
