Lack of bigotry and hatred against Asians was refreshing

I won't say that there's no evidence of a white American condescending attitude towards the Japanese in this failed slapstick comedy/Korean war movie hybrid. There is. But what you won't see is hatred and bigotry towards Orientals as you might assume for a 1961 movie, especially only eight years after the Korean War which saw American troops battling the North Koreans and Red Chinese on the Korean peninsula.

Instead, the odd Band of Marine Brothers treat the Japanese as fellow party animals. By this time in 1951, occupied Japan has been rebuilt and is a leave and recreation paradise for exhausted G.I.s, Marines, Navy, and Air Force personnel. The Japanese people have no cultural taboo against sexual relationships between Americans and Japanese women, like the Middle Easterners have. Only a mere six years prior, the U.S. and Japan were locked in a bitter, rage-filled, to-the-death struggle, the smelly, barbaric yanks versus the ugly, bucktoothed, barbaric japs. But that was 1945. This is 1951 and glittering, downtown Tokyo's Ginza is the place to be for all American enlisted men, enjoying the sights, nightclubs, liquor, beer, and company of countless beautiful, sloe-eyed, black-haired, white cream complexioned, hairless bodied Japanese young women, that made many a young white serviceman forget about the pretty white girls back in mainland USA. You wonder if all these curvy, creamy white-skinned Asiatic beauties represent a kind of exotic white women to these testosterone-fueled, young American men in the prime of virility.

The band of Marine friends even includes a Japanese American, who is liked by all, speaks perfect English (a tribute to the director who didn't lower himself to having the man speak pidgin English) and turns out to be the most level-headed and dependable guy in the group. Even the group's leader, pug-faced McCafferty, who bullies everyone else in the squad, is respectful to him.

When the band of Marine buddies finish their wild highjinks in Tokyo and get into trouble, they are returned to Korea to help repel the last big Red Chinese offensive in the spring of 1951. In battle, the Marines fight the Red Chinese without hate or racial bigotry. It's just a dirty job to them. They fight the Chinese as if they were fighting Germans or Italians. The enemy is just the enemy. The director doesn't avoid the opportunity to portray the Red Chinese as heartless villains when he has the chance but one of the Marine pals avoids a bad fate.