Reeling Backward: "Objective, Burma!" (1945)

I started out actively disliking "Objective, Burma!", but the movie eventually won me over. It begins like every other standard-issue World War II propaganda film, with a bunch of swell guys banding together through adversity to overcome the troglodyte enemy. It even stars a bunch of the same actors in supporting roles I've seen in other war pictures, with little variance as to their characterizations: the wisecracking New Yorker (George Tobias) playing a New Yorker, the tall Texan (James Brown) is again a Texan, etc.

Eying its nearly 2½-hour run time, I was ready to settle in for a long and laborious trek through the Burmese jungle with the swell gang. In other words, it looked like a repeat of another Raoul Walsh film recently discussed in this space, "Battle Cry," which amounted to nothing more than a bunch of training footage and smoochy-time with the local females.

But somewhere along the way, "Objective, Burma!" morphs into a gritty and realistic drama that gives audiences a taste of what it was really like to be a G.I. dogface trying to survive in the Pacific theater. No smooching here -- there's nary a female in the flick.

Based loosely on history, the story depicts a raid on a Japanese radar station in advance of the Allied invasion of Burma. It's so loose with the facts, though, that it depicts the invasion as an entirely American affair, when in fact the U.S. played only a relatively small role in the operation. Winston Churchill was so upset about the British forces getting the high hat, the film was banned in the U.K. for seven years.

The picture starts out with achingly slow exposition, as a bunch of officers meet in rooms and point at maps, and then the troops get briefed on the mission. They'll be dropped by parachute, take out the radar station, then be picked up at an abandoned airfield later that same day. The commanding officer, Capt. Nelson (Errol Flynn), is not terribly pleased about being saddled with an American newsman, Mark Williams (Henry Hull), who's a mite long in the tooth and green to boot.

Interesting aside: usually having a character who's a writer acts an obvious framing device, as his or her scribblings form the basis for the recollection of the events portrayed. Curiously, Williams dies about three-quarters of the way through the movie, which begs the question of who it was telling their story. The trailer for "Burma" makes this notion even more explicit, showing Williams' notebook pages being flipped to unspool the tale.

The actual raid goes off without a hitch, or even any American fatalities. The men are jabbering away about their easiest mission of the war, and I was bored to tears.

But then a huge Japanese force comes after them, forcing the planes to pull away just as they were about to land. The cakewalk turns into a death march, as they must traverse through the steamy jungle, depending on supply drops from planes to keep them alive as the Japs are never far behind in their vengeful pursuit.

I was struck by how much the screenplay -- by Ranald MacDougall and Lester Cole, story by Alvah Bessie -- focuses on the minutia of the soldiers' experience. We see what sort of food they eat (dry, tasteless rations), setting booby traps using grenades and wire, taking "salt pills" to help keep them from getting dehydrates, and putting water purifying tablets in their canteens to make the swamp muck drinkable.

Movies of this era generally gloss over the unpleasant details of life in the military, so I was impressed by the verisimilitude.

The disposition of the men changes, too, as their numbers dwindle and their odds grow worse. The swell-guy shtick pretty much goes out the window, and they get more and more surly. There's even one occasion where the men refuse to get up at Nelson's orders -- a display of insubordination that one hardly ever sees in movies of the 1940s.

"Objective, Burma!" came out in early 1945, not terribly long after the fate of the war in the Pacific was still in doubt. By this point, the Allied forces were beginning to wrap things up against the Japanese. I think that's why it was possible to release a movie that showed how grim life in the Army can be -- Hollywood realized it was no longer in the business of recruiting new soldiers. That makes it the sort of unglamorous movie you probably wouldn't have seen from the big studios in 1942 or '43.

One more note: Unless I'm mistaken, I believe non-Japanese actors were used to mostly portray the enemy. They certainly don't look or sound Japanese. It's possible they were supposed to be soldiers of other nationalities commanded by the Empire, but it's still a little off-putting.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Air Force" (1943)

Written and shot in the heady days after Pearl Harbor, "Air Force" is a cheery bit of war propaganda that struck a chord with audiences when it was released in early 1943, less than 14 months after the surprise Japanese attack. The fictional tale of the intrepid crew of the B-17 "Mary-Ann" in the days before and after Dec. 7, 1941, it was a box office hit, earned a slew of Oscar nominations (including Best Screenplay) and became a rallying call for the war effort.

Seen today, though, it's a borderline cringe-worthy drama in which American soldiers seem extraordinarily giddy about the prospect of near-certain death, coupled with some terrible special effects miniatures that scarcely look better than cousin Johnny's toy planes and ships blown up with firecrackers.

Throw in some nasty anti-Japanese sentiment, virulent even by the standards of the time, and you've got a war film that has aged exceedingly poorly.

Perhaps most disturbing are several references put in during the Pearl Harbor attack scenes of "local Japanese" or "native Japanese" -- aka Japanese-Americans -- engaging in preplanned sabotage or attacks coordinated with the surprise air strike. Subsequent investigations proved that such claims were completely unfounded.

Though screenwriter Dudley Nichols, who received uncredited assists from Leah Baird, William Faulkner and Arthur T. Horman, cannot be entirely faulted for these harmful scenes -- which doubtless contributed to the xenophobic paranoia that helped justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans. They were working on the movie in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, with the script being altered on the fly to reflect the shifting realities of war.

As a result, a number of historical inaccuracies crept into the story -- such as the B-17 crew flying to Manila, when in fact U.S. troops in the Philippines retreated to Australia shortly after the outbreak of hostilities.

"Air Force" is named after the flying division of the U.S. Army, which didn't get split off into a separate military branch until after the war. Curiously, the studio chose to showcase the Mary-Ann as the real star of the picture, despite a large and able cast of B-list stars and character actors.

John Ridgely plays the skipper, Capt. Michael "Irish" Quincannon, who's the perfect mix of inspiration command. Gig Young (an Oscar winner for "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?") is the trusty co-pilot. Arthur Kennedy, who I'll always remember as the crusty journalist from "Lawrence of Arabia," is the bombadier. Charles Drake turns up as the navigator with daddy issues, George Tobias is the obligatory New Yawkah crewman, and Harry Carey has a nice turn as the elder crew chief.

Rounding things out are James Brown as "Tex" Rader, a fighter pilot who enjoys a good-natured rivalry with the B-17 crew, and John Garfield as Winocki, the cynical gunner.

It's the familiar mix of characters you see in wartime movies, complete with the green young kid, etc. Winocki is the most interesting, since he was a pilot trainee who got washed out of flight school by Quincannon a couple of years earlier, and has a huge chip on his shoulder. His stint in the Army is set to expire three weeks after Pearl Harbor, but it doesn't take too many guesses to know he undergoes a change.

It's that insipid, familiar everybody's-a-swell-guy syndrome, except for the one not-so-swell guy, who later migrates in a swelltherly direction.

My biggest problem with the depiction of the Americans forces is that everyone's just so damn happy all the time! I quickly grew tired of all the aw-shucks smiles and playful bantering, and men cracking jokes even as they know they're about to be overrun by the Japanese. One commanding officer of a tiny island, already grievously wounded, is offered a flight out on the Mary-Ann and refuses with, of course, a joke and a smile.

The combat scenes range from a few decent aerial sections to absolutely horrible. The miniatures of battleships and carriers at sea are entirely unconvincing, as are the numerous shots of planes taking off and landing. There's just no weight to the images -- we can sense the lack of immense inertia from these great steel beasts.

The stuff up in the air is better, with some actual dogfight footage spliced in with decent special-effects shots of enemy planes seen through the gunners' doors. We get a real sense of how a B-17 crew works together -- the gunner on one side shouting out when a target is about to pass over to the other -- and I can't help but think this movie influenced George Lucas when he was shooting the first "Star Wars" film.

War is terrible, but as seen in "Air Force" it's one great big smarmy smilefest, with toy airplanes.

2 stars out of four