"The Strange One" is a very good film but its current score on IMDB would seem to indicate it's an average film and nothing more. Well, as for me, I loved it as the story was very compelling and it was a nice chance to see some very good actors before they became famous (such as Ben Gazzara, James Olson and Mark Richmond).

The story is set in some fictional southern military college...similar to VMI or The Citadel. The story mostly centers around Gazzara's character, an upper classman who is a sociopath who loves mistreating his underclassmen. He also is a master manipulator and all around jerk....and his latest 'prank; results in a cadet being badly beaten and framed for getting drunk....when the young man in question did nothing wrong and the alcohol was forced down his throat.

During course of the story you learn tow important things. First, he was caught tormenting underclassmen before. Second, his fellow classmates hated him...and it took this incident to bring this to the surface. And, in the end, the students come up with a great plan to deal with this jerk.

Well written, exciting and well worth your time. I found this sleeper on YouTube and hope you also give it a try.

Calder Willingham started a career in Hollywood by writing the book, the Broadway play it was based on and finally the screenplay for his work End As A Man. Now on the screen with the title The Strange One it presents a really nasty picture of a southern military academy and some of the cadets there.

There's more than one strange individual in The Strange One. But the title refers to protagonist Ben Gazzara who is both charismatic and evil. A good old southern boy he holds the rest of his set in some kind of sway and they're all afraid of him.

What Gazzara has put in motion is a carefully laid out scheme to embarrass Larry Gates the second in command of the academy by getting his son Geoffrey Horne expelled. With the aid of some lower classmen and a couple of sycophants he gets Horne drunk and leaves him out all night on the parade grounds. Horne is expelled and later Gates loses control when confronting Gazzara.

But at some points all the worms turn. I suspect in both the novel and the play Gazzara gets worse than what he got here.

The play ran 105 performances on Broadway during the 1953-54 season and besides Gazzara, Pat Hingle, Paul Richards, Arthur Storch, and Peter Mark Richman all repeat their roles from Broadway.

Richards is a halfway out of the closet gay man who Gazzara just toys with, catch that deliciously erotic scene as Richards who fancies himself a novelist reads some of his writings to Gazzara as Gazzara plays with his ceremonial sword. The shy and introspective Storch is another closet case who is just crushing out big time on roommate George Peppard who was making his big screen debut as was Gazzara.

It seemed like half the Actor's Studio got involved in this project. But they all do a fine job especially Gazzara who is terrifying and twisted.

And these are the guys who will be defending America.

Ben Gazzara is Jocko de Paris, a senior cadet at a military school and a real sadistic rat. His fellow students include some familiar names including Pat Hingle and George Peppard. This is one of those military schools in which senior cadets constantly rag the plebes, making them do and say foolish things, within reason. The problem is that Gazzara doesn't seem to recognize the limits of the permissable. At the very beginning, he sets up a phony poker game to cheat a rather dull football-playing senior, James Olson, out of ninety-some dollars -- after they get Olson drunk.

So far, so good. But then we are sort of blindsided by a shift in the plot. The bilking of Olson is shunted aside as Gazzara pounds on the wall in a deliberate attempt to arouse the cadet, Geoffrey Horne, sleeping in the next room -- knowing all the while that Horne, the son of the commanding officer, is bound to report the noisy and illegal goings on. Horne duly reports the ruckus but when the guards investigate, all seems to have been restored to normal.

Then some important events occur but are elided from the narrative. At the next morning's roll call, Horne is absent but is found bloody and drunk elsewhere on the campus. Subsequent dialog, which is a little fuzzy, indicates that Jocko de Paris beat Horne unconscious, then shoved a tube down into his belly and poured whiskey into it from a douche bag. Peppard, Hingle, Richards, and Olson were also involved somehow, but it's not clear how. "The room was so dark Ah didn't know whut was happenin'," explains Hingle.

Anyhow, Horne is convicted of enough offenses to get him expelled, which happens apace, though it breaks his father's heart (Larry Gates, not the only 50s utility player with no discernible talent).

Does Gazzara feel any remorse? Like heck. Then why did he do it, having nothing against Geoffrey Horne to begin with? He did it because he enjoys seeing people in pain, a statement that reminds me a little of my marriage, so better to say Gazzara did it for reasons similar to those of the two dudes who first climbed Mount Everest. Or maybe Rhoda in "The Bad Seed." Not only does Gazzara get another cadet kicked out, but when Hingle questions him about the ethics of the deed, Gazzara tells him that he, Hingle, will be held responsible as the ringleader. "I used to think you was a card, Jocko, and you are. You the ace of spades, boy." Well, very briefly, the other cadets involved have a crisis of conscience, and confess to the cadets' honor society. They kidnap Gazzara after making him sign a confession, blindfold him, tote him around while he threatens them and screams with fear, and dump him on a train that departs the town. The end.

It's an interesting film for a number of reasons, if not an especially important one. The problems dealt with seem rather minor in some ways. We don't get to know Goeffrey Horne's victim at all, so his victimization is drained of some of its dramatic potential. And although we want to see Jocko punished for his misdeeds, it would be nicer if the system itself handed out justice. Instead we have to rely on a couple of dozen cadets who take matters into their own hands, coercing a confession out of Gazzara and then committing crimes in the course of getting rid of him. Gazzara aptly compares them to the Ku Kux Klan. The plot also isn't true to itself. Throughout, Gazzara has displayed cunning and self discipline, yet at the end is shrieking with horror, whining not to be hurt, babbling beggarly pleas. The climax would have been more effective had Gazzara faced his punishment bravely, if not necessarily with dignity.

What's interesting about it is seeing so many familiar faces so near the beginnings of their careers. Can you imagine Pat Hingle as a young military cadet? Or James Olson with a full head of hair? Gazzara gives what is probably his best performance as the sinister, sadistic Jocko, although his outrageous hamminess as Al Capone later in his career, an imitation Marlon Brando, his cheeks stuffed with what appear to be rolls of toilet paper, is much funnier. There are also intimations of homosexuality on the part of two of the cadets. (One is not very covert.) There were to be a number of films in the two decades to follow that were set among the cadet community at The Citadel or somewhere, splashier than this one, but this was an original by Calder Willingham. The one I enjoy most, actually, is an episode in the TV series "Colombo," called "Dawn's Early Light." The heavy is Patrick McGoohan and in his acting he outshines anyone else in any of the military cadet movies.