Wake Me When It's Over (film)

Wake Me When It's Over
Directed by	Mervyn LeRoy
Produced by	Mervyn LeRoy
Written by	Richard L. Breen
Based on	Wake Me When It's Over 1959 novel by Howard Singer
Starring	Ernie Kovacs Dick Shawn Margo Moore Jack Warden
Music by	Cyril J. Mockridge
Cinematography	Leon Shamroy
Edited by	Aaron Stell
Production company	Mervyn LeRoy Productions Inc.
Distributed by	Twentieth Century-Fox
Release date	April 8, 1960
Running time	126 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$2,000,000 (US/ Canada)

Wake Me When It's Over is a 1960 DeLuxe Color comedy film starring Ernie Kovacs and Dick Shawn in CinemaScope. A World War II veteran gets called back into service by mistake and sent to a dreary Pacific island. It is based on the novel of the same name by Howard Singer.

Gus Brubaker (Dick Shawn) is a self-described schnook. Soon after the end of the Korean War, his wife talks him into applying for G.I. insurance for which he is eligible from his World War II service with the Air Force. Gus is reluctant because he was shot down and became a prisoner of war, but the military listed him as killed. A red-tape foulup results in Gus being back in uniform, assigned to a ramshackle radar station on a backwater island near Shima, Japan. Boredom has made the airmen assigned there apathetic, slovenly, and unmotivated. Its equipment and supplies are a collection of junk, abandoned or surplus.

Capt. Charlie Stark (Ernie Kovacs), a free-wheeling nonconformist Air Force pilot, is in charge. His superiors have all but forgotten the base is still on the island. Gus gets to know Ume Tanaka (Nobu McCarthy), daughter of the village's unfriendly mayor, who shows him a pool of natural hot springs. Gus and Charlie conspire to open a resort hotel, using the men as labor and the broken-down equipment as materials, with Doc Farringtom (Warden) scamming journalist Joab Martinson (Robert Emhardt) about the water's "healing powers" to gain free publicity.

Doc summons no-nonsense Lt. Nora McKay (Margo Moore) to lend a woman's touch to the project, and Charlie develops a romantic interest in her. The airmen, including Charlie, are motivated by the project and their pretty young lieutenant, become a military outfit again, and construct a first-class facility, the Hotel Shima. Nora staffs the hotel with 40 young women from the village, and following local custom, the girls are "sold" for two years to Gus as their "papa-san" at the insistence of their fathers. Nora and Charlie fall in love, but when he asks her to marry him, she is doubtful that he is marriage material.