If you want to trace the development of the Hollywood war film, from tongue in cheek frivolity to tough, weary verisimilitude, you couldn't do much better than comparing this with another Errol Flynn vehicle, Desperate Journey. Unlike that film, this one is serious, hard and lacks any sort of female interest - the soldiers still wisecrack, but they are professional, no-nonsense killers who follow orders and get along with each other (unless really stressed) i.e. there is no contrived in-fighting, the enemy are ruthless and clever. Apart from Errol the only really well known member of the cast is Henry Hull, who is a bit too bombastic as a war correspondent; the others are pretty much unknowns, which makes it hard to tell who is who at times (so when they die it lessens the impact as you can't really remember or care who they were) - but it does add to tension since you're only sure Errol is going to make it home alive.
The film became known for being banned in Britain, for slighting British contribution to the Burma campaign - which, to be honest, it does: the opening spiel which sets the scene barely mentions the British making the whole thing seem like Stillwell fulfilling an "I will return" like promise (Merrill's Marauders also get a mention); we see one British solider (who assigns two Gurkhas to the expedition), but after that British are only mentioned as having outposts and the invasion at the end seems like an American operation. It didn't deserve to be banned, but it was a bit insensitive of Warner Bros not to change the intro and outro to mention the Brits a bit more, especially as it needn't have affected any of the guts of the film, and also Burma really was more a British-India campaign. George MacDonald Fraser, who served in the British army in Burma, wrote that British soldiers would have liked to have seen the film and he thought the reaction at home was partly due to guilt feelings about neglect of the Burma campaign (which was extensive - how many British films can you recall about Burma? Off the top of my head: The Purple Plain, Yesterday's Enemy and The Long, The Short and The Tall, all of which were made after the war.)
This film is also notorious for racism: soldiers including Errol casually refer to the Japanese as "slope-eyed" and "monkeys", Americans mow down Japanese like fish in a barrell, and Hull gives a talk after finding the Japanese have mutilated and killed some captured American soldiers where he says "wipe them all out I say" (Errol is silent during this but he doesn't say Hull is wrong). I would regard this as another example of the film making a greater attempt to reflect with more accuracy the values of its time.
Some writers such as David Shipman rank this as one of the best war movies; I wouldn't go that far, it is too long (eg the invasion sequence at the end goes on and on so), has the aforementioned problems of indistinguishable characters, etc. But it is definitely above average: stunning James Wong Howe photography, pleasing aura of reality (including documentary footage, emphasis on sweat and discomfort while fighting in the jungle), and many memorable sequences: the parachute jump (one of the reason the film runs so long is it lingers over what is rushed by in other combat movies but in this case it provides an exciting moment), arrival at the temple to find the tortured soldiers (a friend of Errol's asks him to kill him - he dies before our star has the chance, obviously they didn't want to go too hard core), the death of Hull the audience surrogate, the final attack by the Japanese at night, Errol handing over the dog tags at the end.
Errol gives a fine, restrained performance - but really any star could have been in this film. (After the rape trial it seems Warners tried to steer Errol away from overly-Errol-esque roles and in The Edge of Darkness and this he was particularly buttoned down. His character here is a former architect who smokes a lot, a good leader of men, but not Captain Blood - which makes his harsh reception in Britain all the more ironic.) Top Franz Waxman score.
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