is a 1963 American comedy drama film directed by David Miller and starring Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, Angie Dickinson, Robert Duvall, Eddie Albert and Bobby Darin.

[3] In 1944, psychiatrist Captain Josiah Newman is head of the neuro-psychiatric Ward 7 at the Colfax Army Air Field (AAF) military hospital, located in the Arizona desert.

At Newman’s insistence, despite resistance from superiors, Colonel Bliss, a “brilliant military tactician,” is evaluated for an underlying medical condition when he displays erratic behavior related to a small social faux pas.

A schizophrenic, Colonel Bliss compulsively repeats commands to a New Guinea squadron he ordered to their doom in combat and speaks in alliteration (“babbling brightly” he is “bored with being beleaguered with brainless benighted blockheads”).

Administered sodium pentothal, he relives the experience of being shot down in a plane, stumbling his way out of wreck before it blew up, and then finding his best friend dead with his head blown off.

Colonel Pyser tells Newman they are not to receive therapy: “If they hate their fathers, that’s all right with us.” True to his usual resourcefulness, Leibowitz speaks Italian (“In the neighborhood I came from you had to know six different languages to do business.”) and takes the POWs under his wing.

The POWs lend comic relief for the Christmas pageant when Leibowitz teaches “The Caroling Carusos” an “old American Indian song” and they unwittingly sing “Hava Nagila,” to the audience’s amusement and applause.

In addition, a flock of constantly straying sheep (kept for the medical lab) that find their way to the airfield and a set of feuding orderlies keeps life interesting right up to Christmas 1944.