When War Was Swell

World War II movies are as durable as westerns, which they sometimes resemble. Since the mid-1930s, when Hollywood first noticed the likelihood of war in Europe, something on the order of 1,000 such pictures, dealing with all aspects of the war, have been produced by the allied countries, and a few hundred more were made by the Axis. Russian films from the end of the war till the fall of the Soviet Union were about little else.

“The past is another country,” L.P. Hartley wrote in the opening lines of “The Go Between.” “They do things differently there.” The ways of World War II are made for movies. The issue always comes down to good versus evil, and there’s little doubt about who the bad guys are. Also, the technology, like the politics, is understandable. If a GI had a weapon, he used it. No one could imagine circumstances in which he wouldn’t. One of the enduring myths of the time was that a WAC could fix a tank, or maybe it was a Jeep, with a bobby pin. It wasn’t true of course, but it was very American to think so.

The significance of the 50th anniversary of D-day is probably a factor in the current crop. It will be four years in June--about the amount of time it takes to get a movie before the public--since that great outpouring of patriotic emotion. It affected most Americans and surely shaped movie plans.

As we watch this last black-and-white war, it feels only a little less distant than the Civil War. The past always seems naive. After all, we know what happened next. One of the challenges in watching pictures of an earlier era, made during the time depicted, is to suspend not just disbelief, but knowledge of subsequent events. We must imagine ourselves into the earlier time. You have to make allowances, but if you can walk through that door, for a few hours, you may live in the past--perhaps before your own lifetime--and simultaneously remain in the present. It is one of the cinema’s greatest gifts.

Three films, in particular, stand out:

“THEY WERE EXPENDABLE”

The 1945 film, directed by John Ford, is a Navy picture set in the Philippines in 1942 at the grim nadir of the war in the Pacific. Ford, himself a Navy man, made the picture, grumbling all the way, at the request of the government and the urging of Louis B. Mayer. Most of the action is on Corrigidor, the island in Manila Bay that suffered terrible bombing, and the Bataan Peninsula, where the U.S. endured one of its worst defeats. Those names may not be readily recognized now, but when the picture was released, they conveyed terror and catastrophe.

Robert Montgomery is the commander of a PT Boat Squadron. John Wayne is his second in command. They are on the periphery of the war, nursing their unproven little boats, risking all for very little. Expendable.

It’s a sad story, but never a cynical one. The picture, like many of Ford’s, is about courage and belief. There’s no irony, no wink. Wayne is at his best here. He’s past his early physical beauty (“Stagecoach”) but not yet a parody of himself. He gives a quiet, true performance. The character begins as a bit of a hot head, but grows into himself.

At one point, Wayne is required to perform a funeral service for some of his men. He recites Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem”: “Dig a grave and let me lie./Glad did I live and gladly die. . . . /Home is the sailor, home from the sea,/and the hunter home from the hill.” There are no theatrics, no plummy voice. The emotion is internal and unmistakable. Wayne’s narrow and much imitated vocal range helps make the man seem real.

Donna Reed, as a Navy nurse, has the only substantial woman’s role. The picture is certainly pre-feminist, in the current sense, but that hardly means Reed is a weak vessel. She might sew up shirts while the male doctor sews up wounds, but she’s made of steel and, in her strength, beautiful.

As she assists the surgeon in a makeshift hospital during the bombing of Corrigidor, a bomb rattles the overhead light, endangering the surgery. Reed reaches up and steadies the lamp without looking away from her patient, hardly noticing that she’s doing it. Now that’s a woman you want around in a crisis. Only an ideologue can’t see it.

The romance between Wayne and Reed is decorous and even shy in an antebellum way, appropriate to military life in the Philippines before the war. It’s a John Ford movie so it tends to the sentimental--it all but has a barbershop quartet. The enlisted men are the equivalents of the rustics in an Elizabethan drama, and some of the dialogue would probably make the P.C. police apoplectic. Just before the men are to put themselves in harm’s way, Montgomery says to a sailor, apparently Jewish, “Sholem aleichem, Sammy!” Later, Duke says to a sailor called Irish, “So long, you big Mick.”

The story doesn’t build the way a modern script might. It’s more a series of scenes that depict the men’s courage and frustration. After the fall of the Philippines, the squad is called upon to ferry an unnamed general to a submarine that will take him to Australia. The general’s face isn’t quite seen. There’s a glimpse of dark glasses and then a corncob pipe. No one had to be told that this god-like creature who struck awe into an impossibly young sailor was Douglas MacArthur. No one had to be reminded that he had said, “I will return.” That he made good on that promise makes the sadness of his retreat bearable.

This is a superb movie, available in cassette.

“THE STORY OF G.I. JOE”

William Wellman’s 1945 film of the North African and Italian campaigns is based on Ernie Pyle’s celebrated dispatches from the front. It’s similar to “They Were Expendable” in that it is about real events, still-fresh wounds.

“Wild Bill” Wellman knew war firsthand. He had flown with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I. He shot “G I. Joe” on a stage at the Selznick studio using soldiers on leave and a documentary style.

Burgess Meredith plays Pyle, through whose eyes the story is seen, but the movie belongs to Robert Mitchum. This was the picture that made Mitchum a star. Mitchum rarely played good guys. Here, he takes Italy with doubt in his heart and weariness on his face, qualities that were always with him and that probably kept him from ever becoming John Wayne.

The story of the Italian campaign may have lost some of its political immediacy, but in its place, a glowing elegiac quality has developed. Mitchum plays Capt. Bill Walker, a tough, practical man of utter, selfless devotion to his task and his infantry troops, a man of private wounds who asks no favors from the world and gives none.

During the battle of Monte Cassino, when Mitchum is told the names of newly dead officers, he seems to grow older in front of us. Wellman doesn’t gild the moment. There are a few cuts but the camera moves hardly at all. Mitchum says nothing. As he listens to the names, his eyes seem to sink deeper into his skull.

When Capt. Walker is martyred, one feels despair for a real man’s death and for the generation that fought that war. The death mask Mitchum presents is at once immensely sad and yet inspiring. James Agee said of the closing scene, “It seems to me a war poem as great and as beautiful as any of Whitman’s.”

A few years ago, I had occasion to run the picture in a 16-millimeter print at a film studio. By the end, I was shaken, weeping. On my way out, I went back to the booth to say good-bye to the projectionist. He too was in tears.

“The Story of G.I. Joe” is embroiled in an ownership dispute that keeps this significant American film unavailable. Bootleg cassettes pop up, but the ones I’ve seen are murky and hard to watch.

“TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH”

The 1949 release, directed by Henry King, is about the Air Force. Set in the fall of 1942, its story is about the introduction of daylight precision bombing, but its theme is the psychology of command.

This is one of Gregory Peck’s best performances. He’s called upon to take over a hard-luck bomb group and whip them into shape. He gives no quarter and alienates most of the men. He’s determined not to get drawn into their lives. His task is to bomb vital German factories. “Consider yourselves dead” is just one of his directives.

Had the role been played by a more traditional tough guy, a hard case, I doubt it would have been as compelling. It’s positively spooky to see Peck so rough. Peck’s granite-like presence makes it all the more shocking and emotionally powerful when he suffers a harrowing breakdown.

Real aerial footage is used in the one big combat sequence, but the movie is mostly dialogue, all of it in service of the characters who are frustrated by what they take to be their general’s indifference to their dilemma. Some of the men simply hate Peck, others feel a need to understand him. Peck is interested only in winning. He sees any personal alliance between a commander and his men as a dangerous risk. To know them, Peck feels, is to compromise his ability to send them into combat.

The film is exceptionally well written by Sy Bartlett and Beirne Lay Jr. from their novel. Most importantly, Peck gives a subtle and finally affecting performance. The cassette is readily available.

These pictures show three enduring stars, men who helped shape our culture, at their best. Each man comes to embody the era in a different way. The ability to create a full-blooded character who is both brave and flawed, who becomes both man and metaphor, is a measure and even an obligation of stardom. Wayne, Mitchum and Peck are able to stand for larger issues without seeming to try. They stepped out of the fabric of the country at a time when national unity was not in dispute and showed us what we were at our best. All three represent varying aspects of masculinity under the strain of war. Each of these films were meaningful when they were new, when the issues were current. Now, 50-odd years after the fact, they help us pierce the obstinate veil of the past.