Mister Roberts (1955)

Jack Lemmon: Ensign Pulver

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Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : Captain, it is I, Ensign Pulver, and I just threw your stinkin' palm tree overboard! Now what's all this crud about no movie tonight?

• Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : [reading Mr. Roberts' letter]  Doc, I've been aboard this destroyer for two weeks now and we've already been through four air attacks. I'm in the war at last, Doc! I've caught up with that task force that passed me by. I'm glad to be here. I had to be here, I guess. But I'm thinking now of you, Doc,and you, Frank. And Dolan, and Dowdy, and Insigna and everyone else on that bucket. All the guys everywhere who sail from tedium to apathy and back again, with an occasional side trip to monotony. This is a tough crew on here, and they have a wonderful battle record. But I've discovered, Doc, that the unseen enemy of this war is the boredom that eventually becomes a faith and, therefore, a terrible sort of suicide. l know now that the ones who refuse to surrender to it are the strongest of all. Right now I'm looking at something that's hanging over my desk. A preposterous hunk of brass attached to the most bilious piece of ribbon I've ever seen. I'd rather have it than the Congressional Medal of Honor. It tells me what I'll always be proudest of - that at a time in the world when courage counted most I lived among 62 brave men.

• Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : Frank, I like you. There's no getting around the fact that you're a real likable guy.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : Yeah? Yeah!

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : But...

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : But what?

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : Well, I also think you're the most hapless, lazy, disorganized, and in general, most lecherous person I've ever known in my life.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : I am not!

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : You're not what?

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : I am not disorganized!

• Doc : That's mostly what makes physical heroism - opportunity. It's a reflex. I think that seventy-five out of a hundred young males have that reflex. You take any one of them. Say even Frank Thurlowe Pulver, here. Put him into a B-29 over Japan, and you know what you'd have?

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : No I don't, Doctor.

  Doc : You'd have Pulver, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner. Pulver, who single-handed shot down twenty-three attacking Zeros. Pulver who, with his bare hands, held together the severed wing struts of his plane, and with his bare feet successfully landed his mortally wounded plane on his home field. Reflex. It's like the knee jerk. Strike the patella tendon in any human being, you produce the knee jerk. Look.

  [Doc hits Pulver in the knee and nothing happens] 

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : What's the matter, Doc?

  Doc : Nothing, but stay out of B-29s, Frank, my boy.

• Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : You pretend you want me to improve your mind. You've never finished one book I've given you to read.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : I've finished "God's Little Acre," Doug boy!

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : I didn't give you that. He's been reading "God's Little Acre" for over a year now. He's underlined every erotic passage and added exclamation points. And after a certain pornographic climax, he's inserted the words "well written."

• Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : Doc, he lies in his sack all day long, bores me silly with great, moronic plots against the captain. He's never carried out one of them.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : I haven't, huh?

  Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : No, Frank, you haven't. What ever happened to those marbles you were gonna put in the captain's overhead so they'd roll around all night and keep him awake?

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : Now you've gone too far. Now you've asked for it.

  [pulls out a box] 

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : What does that look like? Five marbles. Got another one in my pocket. Six marbles. I'm looking for marbles all day long!

• Lt. j.g. Douglas A. Roberts : Doc, that new hospital hasn't got nurses, has it?

  Doc : It didn't have yesterday.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : It has today.

  Doc : And how did you find out they were there?

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : It just came to me all of a sudden. I was lying on my bunk this morning, thinking. And there wasn't a breath of air. And all of a sudden, a funny thing happened. A little breeze came up, and I took a big, deep breath, and I said to myself "Pulver, boy, there's women on that island!"

• Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : [singing]  If I could be with you one hour tonight / If I was free to do the things I might / I'm telling you true / I'd be anything but blue / If I could be with you.

• Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : [at the shore hospital, with a requisition slip for aspirin]  I, uh... you know I'm not actually Captain of that AK.

  Lt. Ann Girard : Oh, no kidding.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : I'm, uh, the Exec.

  Lt. Ann Girard : Certainly must have a lot of BF.

  Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : What do you mean? Who, me? What do you mean, "B..."

  Lt. Ann Girard : "Battle Fatigue," with all those aspirin.

• Ensign Frank Thurlowe Pulver : [telling Doc and Mr. Roberts about his visit the shore hospital, where he met nurses]  They flew in last night. Knockouts! And one big blonde, especially, see. Of course she went for me right away, naturally. So I started to turn on the old personality, you know, and I said, "Isn't there anything in the world that will make you come out to this ship with me?" And she... and she says, "Yes, there is one thing, and one thing only! A good, stiff drink of scotch."