PT 109 (1963)
Released in June 1963, just five months before the assassination that would freeze John F. Kennedy in the public imagination forever, PT 109 arrived at a peculiar moment in American cultural life. Kennedy was a sitting president, still very much alive and active in office, yet Warner Bros. had secured his personal blessing for a dramatisation of his wartime service in the Pacific. The story itself, Kennedy's command of Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109 in the Solomon Islands in 1943, had already become something of a legend through a 1961 New Yorker article and subsequent press coverage. A Japanese destroyer had rammed and split the boat in two during the night of 2 August 1943, and the young Lieutenant Kennedy led his surviving crew on a gruelling open-water swim to a small island, later helping to organise their rescue. It was the sort of tale Hollywood was always going to get its hands on eventually, and the early 1960s, with their particular appetite for square-jawed wartime heroism and patriotic spectacle, represented the obvious moment to do it.
Director Leslie H. Martinson was, at that point in his career, a reliable craftsman from television, having worked extensively on shows like Batman and 77 Sunset Strip. He was polished but unremarkable as a feature filmmaker, and Warner Bros. clearly wanted a safe pair of hands rather than an auteur. The production was partly filmed on location in the actual Solomon Islands, which gives certain sequences a genuine geographic texture that studio-bound war films of the period often lacked. It is worth noting that Kennedy reportedly had some say in the casting process, a somewhat extraordinary situation for any studio picture. The film sits comfortably alongside other earnest, studio-produced war dramas of its era, though it has rather less of the moral weight you find in something like I Am Cuba, released just a year later, which was wrestling with the politics of the same broad Cold War period from an entirely different angle.
Cliff Robertson takes the lead as Kennedy, a piece of casting that came directly from Kennedy's own preference after the president apparently saw Robertson in a television drama. Robertson was a capable, serious actor who had built his reputation on understated, thoughtful performances, and he brings genuine commitment to the role. The supporting cast includes Ty Hardin, Robert Culp, and James Gregory, filling out the crew and the command structure with the kind of dependable, familiar faces that Warner Bros. war pictures reliably assembled. None of them are given a great deal to work with beyond their functional roles in the narrative, but they carry the ensemble without embarrassing themselves. The film runs at a considerable 140 minutes, which is a significant ask for what is, at its core, a survival story built around a fairly contained series of events. For another perspective on Pacific and island-based filmmaking from roughly this period, the documentary work reviewed in our piece on Vai offers an interesting counterpoint in terms of how the region has been depicted on screen across different eras.
If you’ve ever flicked on an obscure cable channel on a lazy Sunday afternoon and stumbled upon a perfectly harmless, aggressively middle-of-the-road war picture, you’ll know exactly the vibe of Leslie H. Martinson’s 1963 feature PT 109.
It’s a straightforward recounting of the Pacific campaign exploits of a young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, and in terms of the genre, it’s perfectly alright. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; it’s a standard, "family-friendly" wartime drama that plays things incredibly safe, avoiding the visceral, muddy horrors of the Pacific theatre in favour of a rather tidy, heroic narrative.
Let’s address the elephant in the room: Cliff Robertson, who takes on the monumental task of playing the future president, looks and sounds absolutely nothing like the real John F. Kennedy. The famous, distinctive cadence is entirely absent, replaced by a rather generic, mid-Atlantic delivery. However, I have to admit, once you get past the lack of physical resemblance, Robertson actually does a cracking job. He brings a grounded, earnest leadership to the role that keeps the picture from sinking into pure hagiography, effectively selling the quiet competence of a young officer trying to keep his crew alive against the odds.
The technical execution is where the film’s modest ambitions really show their seams. The soundtrack, for instance, is perfectly serviceable but feels a bit of a mess in terms of originality, leaning heavily on brass-heavy themes that sound like they were lifted straight from a daytime western or a dozen other generic wartime pictures of the era. It does the job of swelling the patriotic heartstrings, but it never quite leaves a lasting impression. Furthermore, the pacing is a touch sluggish; at nearly two hours, the runtime feels a bit too long for a narrative that is, by its very nature, so basic and straightforward.
PT 109 is a deeply unoffensive, thoroughly average piece of historical cinema. It’s not bad, and it certainly isn’t trying to be anything more than a respectful, if somewhat sanitised, tribute to a specific moment in American military history. Martinson delivers exactly what you’d expect: a competent, if uninspired, dramatisation that will satisfy those looking for a gentle, nostalgic bit of wartime storytelling. It’s a fine, forgettable watch.
PT 109 occupies an odd little corner of film history, one where biography, propaganda, and straightforward genre entertainment blur together without any of them fully taking hold. It arrived at the height of Kennedy's popularity and, after his death, acquired a strange memorial quality it was never designed to carry. Seen today, it functions reasonably well as a period document, a record of how a particular era chose to mythologise its leaders while they were still in the room to approve the mythology. Whether that makes it worth your Sunday afternoon is a question only you can answer, but at the very least it is honest about what it is, which is more than can be said for quite a lot of pictures that aim considerably higher. Sometimes the wheel does not need reinventing; sometimes it just needs to get you there and back without a puncture.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1963 | Watched: 2026-07-28
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for PT 109 (1963) on YouTube
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