A completely different film with a younger Roberts

In the play-Mister Roberts is about 25 years old. This is a whole different Movie with a younger cast. It would have been much more poignant if a younger Roberts -with his whole life ahead of him had died a Okinawa. The film now worked as a comedy, with the friction between Cagney and Fonda as the fulcrum point, with Lemmon supplying the comedy relief. This Mister Roberts comes off as old and tired, rundown from bucking the military system personified by Cagney. We see his pursuit of a military command as a old mans self delusion of a shot at glory, rather than a young mans bravery.
To make Fonda look younger they surrounded him with a bunch of actors even older than him, including Cagney and Powell, the ship comes to resemble an old age home on the high seas, the place they stick all the old timers-far from the action and danger, and thats just the way it looks, with Mister Roberts balking to at the boredom of a dull command but instead the plight of anyone hitting midlife, that their youth is gone, and they are n longer in their prime, they are slipping towards old age-and quickly.Some in that mid-life crises by a new shiny car to prove their manhood, Mister Roberts used War as his symbol of vitality.
With a younger Roberts bristling against the authority represented by Cagney-we have a more rebellious movie, similar to 'Cool hand Luke' or any other such movie, and the same themes of a man going up against the system and being ground down by it would have rung true.