Movie review – “Beach Red” (1967) **1/2

Watching The Naked Prey the other night has made me revisit the films Cornel Wilde made as director. This is perhaps his second best known one, the tale of a Marine attack on an island during World War Two. Wilde’s direction is surprisingly bold and imaginative, certainly a lot more than his acting tended to be: this has lots of voice over, flashbacks, freeze frames, non linear narratives. (This felt influenced by Norman Mailer’s novel, The Naked and the Dead.) It’s always interesting, even if the basic story isn’t much – they invade island, people get killed, war is Hell. The acting and characters aren’t that interesting, either (apart from Rip Torn as a gung ho sergeant), though the sense of brutality and harshness is – as is the humanizing of the enemy. The ending, with two soldiers on a deadly patrol, is quite exciting. Must of the action is intimate focusing on only a few soldiers, but then Wilde throws in these cast of thousands epic battle sequences; its like he blew the whole budget on these so had to keep the rest of it minimal (I remember there being something similar in The Sword of Lancelot). Although Wilde – looking old and weary here - plays the lead he isn’t given that much to do, as if director Wilde is all too aware actor Wilde isn’t the best actor in the world. The flashbacks to the women in the soldier’s lives don’t seem very 1940s.