Reeling Backward: "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964)

I was surprised by how inert and ineffective "Cheyenne Autumn" is. I've been meaning to catch up with it for years and came away quite disappointed from the experience.

The film is seminal for a couple of reasons: it was John Ford's last Western, and it was pretty much the first deliberate attempt by Hollywood to cast American Indians in a positive light, showing how they were ill-used by the American government as it expanded into the West.

It's based on a real bit of history, the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-79, during which hundreds of native people left the harsh, arid reservation land that had been set aside for them and traveled more than 1,000 miles north to their ancestral home. There were several skirmishes with the U.S. military along the way, and newspapers of the day portrayed it as a rampaging army of Indians on the warpath.

In truth, they were largely elderly, women and children, and posed no threat to anyone unless their trek was opposed.

The movie was actually based on two novels, "The Last Frontier" by Howard Fast and "Cheyenne Autumn" by Mari Sandoz, though only the latter received a screen credit. Screenwriter James L. Webb had recently won an Oscar for another Western, "How the West Was Won," of which Ford directed one of the five sequences. They ended up reusing a lot of the same talent for this picture, including stars Richard Widmark and Carroll Baker, Webb and Ford.

"Cheyenne" can't quite decide who is its main character. Its heart seems to lie with the Indians, particularly Little Wolf and Dull Knife, the two main leaders of the Northern Cheyenne tribe. They're played by Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland, respectively, both actors of Mexican heritage. Italian-American Sal Mineo plays Dull Knife's hot-headed son, Red Shirt. Most of the other Cheyenne are played by Navajo, and speak in their own language during the film.

But Widmark is put front and center as Capt. Thomas Archer, a fictional Army officer assigned to make them stay put, and later pursue them after they begin their exodus. He's a sympathetic figure torn between his military obligations and his own recognition of the suffering of the Cheyenne. Baker plays Deborah Wright, a Quaker devoted to educating the Indian children who ends up tagging along on their quest.

Their tepid romance is barely sketched in the early part of the film, then quietly tucked away for the rest. There isn't even a big reunion scene and kiss at the end. They have a little cheeky repartee, addressing each other as "Friend Deborah" and "Friend Thomas" in the Quaker way.

The movie's pacing staggers this way and that, an occasional fight scene between the Cheyenne and Army with lots of talking in between. Archer tries to convince his superiors to show the Cheyenne more respect and restraint, but it falls on deaf ears. Eventually he takes his case directly to the Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz (Edward G. Robinson).

Karl Malden has a small but vigorous role as an Army officer who imprisons the Cheyenne on orders, leaving them to freeze and starve to death in a warehouse because he's too afraid to take other action without authorization. The character refers to himself as a Russian, though his accent sounds more German to these ears. Perhaps we'll be generous and say Malden was going for Prussian, and leave it at that.

Patrick Wayne, son of John, has a small part as an impetuous young officer Archer has to continually reprimand. John Carradine turns up in Dodge City as a gambling gentleman.

The music by Alex North is quite good, but often too obtrusive. There's an opening piece and an intermission that is probably unnecessary.

By far the biggest problem with the film is the Dodge City sequence. It arrives just before the intermission, and completely rips the audience out of the story of the Cheyenne.

It stars Jimmy Stewart as Wyatt Earp and Arthur Kennedy as Doc Holiday, portrayed here as peevish, aging gamblers who have taken up the offices of sheriff and deputy simply to allow them to sit in the saloon and play cards all day. They want nothing to do with the Cheyenne "horde" passing nearby, and Earp even contrives to lead the ad-hoc force of vengeful vigilantes in a different direction.

It's a weird, weird sequence that belongs in another movie. It's completely comedic in tone, right down to a saloon wench losing her dress and some vagrant cowpunchers getting one-upped by the wily Wyatt. One wonders what Ford and Webb were thinking including it in the film, especially seeing as the original cut was creeping up on three hours -- Ford's longest movie.

Indeed, after being initially released in theaters the Dodge City section was cut out, and wisely so. Most modern versions on video include it, to the detriment of the overall experience. This is where the "chapter skip" button comes in handy.

"Cheyenne Autumn" is undeniably a magnificent-looking film, shot largely in Ford's beloved Monument Valley with widescreen and lots of vivid colors. Cinematographer William H. Clothier deservedly received the film's sole Academy Award nomination.

At the time of its release, John Ford publicly declared "Cheyenne Autumn" to be an elegy for the Native American. It says something of the man that during his lifetime he came to recognize that his own work bore a great deal of responsibility for the popular depiction of Indians as whooping savages, and it was something he regretted.

He tried to get the movie made for years without success. When he finally did, it was his longest and most expensive project, and one of the few that was a commercial failure. Ill health and a lack of confidence from the studios resulted in Ford only completing one other feature film.

It's such a shame that one of the greatest movie directors ended his career on such a sour note. John Ford's song of regret for the Indian, while noble in purpose, is a discordant and dull affair.

Reeling Backward: "How the West Was Won" (1962)

By 1962 Hollywood knew the jig was up.

Audiences, with expanding options of quality programming on television, would no longer automatically show up to the cinemas for whatever fare they had thrown together. Actors and directors were tired of being workhorses for the studios, told to go here and do that, and wanted the power to pick their own projects. Certain quintessentially American genres, notably the musical and the Western, were increasingly seen as creaky and worn out.

The Golden Age, for good and naught, was waning -- and everyone knew it.

The reaction from Tinseltown, at least for awhile, was to deliver things TV couldn't: color pictures, big action spectacles, widescreen formats, stereo sound, 3-D imagery and so on. One of the big ideas was Cinerama, which stretched an extremely wide image across a huge curved screen, so the audience literally felt like the movie was wrapping around their field of vision.

To get some perspective, the aspect ratio of most films today is 1.85 to 1, width to height. Modern flatscreen TVs are 1.78, so when movies are played on them you only get a little bit of black bar at the top and bottom. (Rarer) widescreen movies are usually 2.35, so the bars are much bigger. Cinerama was 2.59, so when I watched the film on my set the film only occupied the middle third or so of the screen.

Only two major feature films were made using this process, which involved shooting with three separate 35mm cameras and then using a trio of projectors in the theater.  "How the West Was Won" was a big success, the second highest-grossing film of that year, but it was too expensive to outfit more than a handful of theaters with the setup.

When shown as a single image on a flat screen, the three pieces tended to not match up well, with noticeable lines during bright scenes. Since most theaters didn't undertake the upgrade, this is how most audiences saw it. Despite its early success, Cinerama died a quick death.

MGM undertook a restoration of the movie in 2000, and new Blu-ray editions include a version that simulates the curved Cinerama look. I've included two stills of the same scene above so you can see the marked difference in presentation.

Filmmakers didn't like the logistics of shooting in Cinerama, either, since it required them to position the actors and backgrounds in such a way that the performers might not even be looking at the person they were talking to in the scene. John Ford, who directed one of the film's five sequences, complained that you couldn't shoot closer than the waist up, which limited the ability to give audiences an emotional connection with the characters.

Much like the green screen technology of today, the final result could be fabulous, but required a talented and attentive cast and director to preserve the performance aspect.

The visual look of the restored "How the West Was Won" is often breathtaking, with glorious vistas of the American fields, rivers and mountains. Narratively the story spreads over 50 years, from 1839 to 1889, covering the settlement of Ohio, the gold rush, the Civil War, the building of a transcontinental railroad line and the height of the outlaw era. It's all told through the eyes of a single family, as subsequent generations grow up and move on further West.

The final movie was a languid 164 minutes, but includes lengthy musical overtures (by Alfred Newman) at the beginning, middle and end that probably consume at least 20 minutes on their own. Everything about the film telegraphs that it wants to be seen as an old-school epic, but really it's several small, barely interrelated stories strung together.

In a gimmicky move, different directors were hired for the five sections, though Henry Hathaway helmed most: the first, second and fifth. Ford directed the third and shortest section on the Civil War, which is really more of a vignette than a true standalone story. George Marshall oversaw the fourth and probably best sequence on the often merciless drive to connect the railroads from east to west.

It was nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won three for Sound, Editing and James R. Webb's screenplay -- thought it did not get a nod, notably, for directing.

The film also has the prerequisite "All Star Cast," though most of them have very fleeting parts. John Wayne is in it for about two minutes, along with Henry Morgan, playing great Union generals Sherman and Grant during the Civil War section. Jimmy Stewart has a bigger part as a frontier trapper who falls for one of the daughters (Carroll Baker) of cantankerous pioneer Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden) in the first sequence. Stewart gets stabbed by some river pirates (led by the great Walter Brennan) but survives to win the girl.

Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark turn up in the railroad section as, respectively, a fiercely independent scout and the hardcase overseer of the building operation, who's willing to break the treaty with the Arapaho Indians and start a war if it'll mean shaving a few days off his schedule.

Gregory Peck plays a gambler who courts, then deserts, then nabs again one of the Prescott daughters, played by Debbie Reynolds, who wants to marry a rich husband and move back East but ends up as a saloon showgirl instead. Robert Preston plays the wagon train master who pitches his own woo at her, telling her about the matching suitability of his huge ranch and her ample child-bearing hips, but she's looking for a little more romance. Thelma Ritter plays an over-the-hill female pioneer who desperately wants to get married; I kept thinking she would hook up with the Preston character.

Eli Wallach turns up in the last sequence as Charlie Gant, a particularly nasty outlaw who avoided jail years ago and is back to torment the lawman who killed his brother. They each put lead into the other they still carry, so there's no love lost. It seems like a clear precursor to Wallach's Spaghetti Western roles later on.

Really the biggest star in the picture in terms of screen time is George Peppard playing Zeb Rawlings, the son of the Jimmy Stewart and Carroll Baker characters. He's the main character in the last three sequences. In the Civil War he's a scrappy young recruit who becomes disillusioned by the senseless killing. In the railroad section he's a U.S. Cavalry officer charged with keeping the peace, who continually butts heads with the Widmark villain. Finally he's the marshal, now with a wife and kids of his own, who faces off with Charlie Gant, as Debbie Reynolds returns as an aged doyenne of San Francisco who wants to spend her last years on a ranch.

Spencer Tracy narrates the tale with openings to each sequence, plus a flowery speech at the end about how the suffering and triumphs of those Western pioneers allowed us to have all the great stuff we have today. It's a little disconcerting as the airborne camera swoops over the vistas, which gradually become more and more occupied with the mark of humanity, including highways and smoke-belching factories. I suppose in 1962 those things were seen as hallmarks of progress rather than urban sprawl.

I guess I like the idea of "How the West Was Won" more than the totality of the movie itself. It's generally quite entertaining, and even grand at times. But it feels more like a lot of haphazard pieces washing down the current of history than a coherent film.

Reeling Backward: "Rear Window" (1954)

Somebody once asked me how I choose the movies to write about in the "Reeling Backward" column. More specifically, they asked why I seemed to choose mostly obscure films most people have never heard of -- like "Panic in Year Zero" or "Yellow Sky."

"If you're going to write about a Humphrey Bogart movie, why not pick 'Casablanca' instead of 'Across the Pacific'?" went the line of questioning, or something like it.

There are essentially two reasons. One is that I started this feature largely as a way to expand my own film education. Even for a hardcore movie buff, it astonishes me how many classic films (and modern pictures) I've never seen. Seeing as one tends to see the most famous stuff first, I make it a point to reach out for movies I've never encountered. By necessity, that means casting my net farther.

But another reason is that I try to be interesting and write about my insights into a movie, hopefully with some originality and touch of wit. I see these less as reviews of old movies as essays, or even my personal movie diary.

Frankly, so many people have written volumes of prose about "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane" and other greats, I feel adding my voice to the din serves little purpose. I doubt many people would read it, and I'm modest enough about abilities to recognize that it's unlikely I could say anything really new.

But occasionally I pick a high-profile subject I'm already very familiar with just because, dang it, I really like the movie and want to spend some time re-watching and thinking about it.

I got a copy of the remastered "Rear Window" well more than a year ago, but hadn't gotten around to watching it for a variety of reasons. (Mostly, a little blond boy who came into my life.) I think I know why. As a suspense film, "Rear Window" derives most of its satisfaction from the revelations of the plot. Watching it again and again fails to capture the thrill of seeing it unfold for the first time.

Especially, that fantastic moment when Raymond Burr, playing the killer, looks up into the camera (which has been acting as Jimmy Stewart's gaze) and realizes that the entirety of his nefarious activity has been closely observed. That's a once-in-a-cinematic-lifetime moment.

Even great thrillers, like "Silence of the Lambs," lose some of their appeal after their mysteries have been revealed.

"Rear Window" obtains more of its freshness than, say, "Psycho" because the plot works backwards. The identity of the killer is made known early on, and the entire story is about L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries, a photographer laid up with a badly broken leg, trying to prove that a murder has even taken place. He sits at his window in his Greenwich Village apartment, staring and spying on his neighbors in the little courtyard of buildings.

I won't talk too much about the voyeurism that is a central motif in Alfred Hitchcock's movies, and is brought to the fore here. It was one of the New Wave guys, film critics who became filmmakers, who pointed out that the view of the neighbors is like a movie screen, and Jeff takes the place of the audience, playing peeping tom so we won't feel bad about doing so.

I will say that the studio set built for this picture is simply a marvel, a canvas of windows and the human carnival partially glimpsed through them. Only a sliver of the city street is visible through an alley, making the courtyard seem like a quiet oasis removed from the bustle and danger of New York City.

Except, of course, there's plenty of foul play going on here. Lars Thorwald (Burr), a costume jewelry salesman, offs his invalid wife and -- Jeff later determines -- cuts her up into pieces and carries them out of the apartment in his sample case.

Jeff spends most of the movies trying to make the case to his detective friend Doyle (Wendell Corey). He quickly makes converts of his nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) and girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly). They soon become his conscripts, hunting down evidence and even -- in perhaps the film's most memorable sequence -- Lisa sneaking into Thorwald's apartment while he's away.

Little comment is made upon the movie's title (which did not come from the short story upon which John Michael Hayes based the screenplay, "It Had to Be Murder" by Cornell Woolrich). Jeff, in a heated argument with Stella about the propriety of using binoculars and a telephoto lens to spy on his neighbors, says "I'm not much on rear-window ethics."

This could have two meanings. The most common understanding is that it's not right to watch people unobserved, since people behave differently when they're interacting with society and quite another when they're in private. How many of us would like to have our intimate daily doings, even the most innocent ones, broadcast for others' eyes?

But another meaning is that things seen through the rear window of a car are by definition things that are behind us, and therefore in our past. My take on Jeff's dialogue is that he's in the midst of doing what he must, and he will consider the morality of it later on. He's also talking about his lifestyle, which is a freewheeling cycle of exotic assignments and dangerous thrills, and that he prefers to live in the moment. He'll worry about today, tomorrow.

This is in contrast to the carefully-ordered life of Lisa, and the source of the tension in their relationship.

Either way, "Rear Window" has remained an enduring classic because it's not just a clever potboiler, but a nagging and probing film that raises uncomfortable truths about how people behave toward one another ... especially when we think no one's looking.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "No Highway in the Sky" (1951)

"No Highway in the Sky" was an early progenitor of the disaster flick genre, and quite possibly the first film ever made about a commercial airliner in peril. A quarter-century later, this sort of thing would become fodder for a movie-going public with a ferocious appetite for things that crash, burn, erupt or sink. Of course, then came the inevitable "Airplane" spoofs, followed by the whole thing coming full circle with modern plane disasters like "Red Eye," "Air Force One" and "Flightplan."

The latter picture most resembles "No Highway in the Sky," in that it's about a socially awkward scientist trying to convince everyone that the airplane is unsafe and must turn back, immediately. No captain every follows this advice, at least in the movies.

I imagine the film was quite bothersome to the nascent commercial airline companies when it came out in 1951, especially with that title explicitly contrasting the safety of the American highway to the dangerous, untested machines hurtling through the air. Within a few years flying would surpass driving as the preferred -- and safest -- mode of long-distance transportation. 

Jimmy Stewart plays Theodore Honey, a British scientist -- with a curiously absent English accent -- working for a large airline company, the Royal Aircraft Establishment. This is not exactly a plausible-sounding name for a real company, but then "No Highway in the Sky" is a pretty awful-sounding title, too. The film is based on the book by Nevil Shute, adapted for the screen by R.C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel, and helmed by journeyman director Henry Koster.

Honey is a widower who lives alone with his 12-year-old daughter Elspeth (Janette Scott), wears only one suit and can't remember the number of the apartment where he has lived for the past eight years. It's the classic cinematic genius archetype, his head so filled with physics and high-end mathematics that the mundane challenges of the workaday world leave him baffled.

Honey is running an experiment about the reliability of the tail section of the new "Reindeer" propeller airliner. He's convinced that metal fatigue will cause the tail to fall off after 1,440 hours of flight time, based on his calculations. One Reindeer already crashed under mysterious circumstances, and Honey is sure it was the tail section that caused it.

His experiment involves shaking a Reindeer tail in a laboratory to see if it'll snap off. Unfortunately, he's only allowed to run the vibrating machine for eight hours a day, due to noise complaints from the neighbors. It seems like Honey's only function is waiting around in that vast hangar, hoping the tail will split off.

He's recruited by a new forward-thinking company executive (Jack Hawkins) to fly out to the site of the Reindeer that crashed. Honey resists at first, saying that scientists must concern themselves with facts and not be swayed by the emotional factor of human lives and relationships. Indeed, Honey had not even told anyone about his theory that the tail sections will fall off until the exec questioned him about his work.

Honey has, in fact, never even flown on a plane before -- I enjoyed Stewart's gangly crab-walk up the boarding stairs, like a man suddenly plopped on the moon and told to traverse the foreign landscape. In fact, well into the flight he learns that the plane is in fact a Reindeer, and one of the oldest ones with more than 1,400 hours of flight time.

Honey appeals to the captain to turn back -- we already know how that ruena out -- and then turns his attentions to two women aboard the flight. Marjorie (Glynis Johns), a young and helpful stewardess (don't bark, that's what they called them then) tries to control the situation of a passenger causing a panic. The other is Monica Teasdale, played by the great Marlene Dietrich, a famous movie star. Because Honey's deceased wife adored Teasdale's pictures, he tries to warn her about their impending doom. The actress at first is put off by this strange man, but then puts faith in his analytical mind. When the plane lands without incident, though, she dismisses him.

Dietrich's character is really unessential to the story, but having her around jazzes things up. Dietrich -- 50 years old and without a line on her iconic face -- has a mesmerizing effect on any film, and her presence is used to good effect here.

Honey sabotages the plane by pulling up the landing gear while it's grounded, causing it to collapse and be destroyed. The last third or so of the movie is concerned with the aftershocks of this incident, in which Honey is accused of insanity and ineptitude. In an unlikely turn of events, Marjorie comes to live with Honey and his daughter, taking care of them during his travails.

The plot is pretty contrived hokum, even by the standards of a nascent airline industry that was uncharted territory for 1951 audiences. In the end, of course, Honey is proved right all along and vindicated.

The airline honchos, played by Hawkins and Ronald Squires, seem awfully accommodating to an oddball egghead whose ideas are threatening a major blow to their company's reputation and financial standing. As the inquiry commences and the pressure mounts, they're shown to be firmly in Honey's corner, if trying not to be too obvious about it. Perhaps my own encounters with the corporate world of late have left me cynical, but I doubt men in their position would be doing anything other than frantically covering their own tail sections.

I should note that the airplane is a model, both in its ground scenes and in the air, and not very convincing in either case. When Honey collapses the Reindeer, part of the engine tears open to reveal a hollow wooden frame. The passenger compartment and especially the cockpit are laughably cavernous -- the pilot and co-pilot are joined by no less than three other officers working their own stations along a corridor between the pilots' seats and the passenger cabin.

"No Highway in the Sky" is notable for its nascent depiction of both airline travel and disaster film dynamics. Unfortunately, it's not very skilled at executing either one.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: The Stratton Story

Jimmy Stewart was not missing a leg, and he could not throw a big-league fastball. Despite this, he makes a fairly convincing portrayal of a real-life right-hander in "The Stratton Story."

This 1949 movie tells the real-life story of Monty Stratton, a promising young pitcher for the Chicago White Sox who had his right leg amputated following a hunting accident. Its shaky veracity pushes it more into the "based on a true story" category, as much of the facts have been changed around.

The film portrays Stratton as making a big comeback in the All-Star game a few months after his 1938 accident. In fact, Stratton never played major league ball again. The Sox took him on as a pitching coach for a few years, and then he tried to make a comeback throughout the 1940s, pitching on a variety of minor league and semi-pro teams.

Don't get me wrong: It's still very impressive that he was able to compete at a high level with a prosthetic leg -- and the crude wooden versions from 60 years ago, not the high-tech jobs they have now. But if you're going to make a movie about a one-legged guy who keeps playing in the big leagues, it would kind of help if he actually did.

It's like making a movie about someone with no arms who climbed Mount Everest, except he never made it closer than 500 feet from the summit.

But that aside, it's a pretty entertaining flick in that familiar vein of "humble country boy makes it big." The tone is very close to "Pride of the Yankees."

Stratton's wife is played by June Allyson, who also was married to Stewart in "Strategic Air Command," which I wrote about a few months ago and also had a baseball connection.

Not to rag on Jimmy Stewart, but his pitching motion is rather weak in the movie. I realize that an actor's goal is not to throw a 90 mph fastball, but to make the audience believe that he could. Well, in that regard they fail.

Director Sam Wood makes the bold choice of actually having his leading man throw the pitches himself, and shows the ball's progress all the way from mound to catcher's mitt in a single take. Stewart's throwing style is awkward -- he has a strange wind-up and virtually no follow-through. If this picture were being made today, you'd see the star in close-up winding up, then a bunch of fast edits to make it seem like the ball was screaming across the plate.

I liked the supporting performance by Frank Morgan as Barney Wile, a washed-up ex-ball player who discovers Stratton while he's hitching around the country as a train hobo. Stratton's meteoric rise also allows Barney to return to the game as a pitching coach. Morgan's crusty but warm-hearted presence lights up every scene he's in.

The redoubtable Agnes Moorehead plays Stratton's mother. Moorehead had a wonderful run as a supporting actress on film and TV, getting her first movie as the mother in "Citizen Kane."

I'd like to point out that Moorehead was only eight years older than Stewart, who was 41 when this movie was made -- 15 years older than Stratton was when he lost his leg.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "They Were Expendable" and "Strategic Air Command"

Recently I watched a couple of old war flicks that I'd heard of but never knew much about. "Strategic Air Command" stars Jimmy Stewart as an Air Force pilot, and "They Were Expendable" has John Wayne as a PT boat captain.

The thing that struck me most about them was their bleak tone and unabashed confrontation with the unpleasant realities of military service. This is surprising, since they're both essentially propaganda films. "Expendable" was made by John Ford while serving as an auxiliary officer during WWII, and "SAC" came out in 1955 at the height of the Cold War, right as America was building up its nuclear arsenal.

In "SAC" Stewart plays a professional baseball player who is, in essence, stop-lossed and forced to return to the Air Force. Even though the country is not at war, the air command general orders all reserve officers back to active duty. This messes up Stewart's baseball career, as well as putting his new marriage on the coals. A surprising amount of the movie deals with the marital tensions between the reluctant officer and his bride.

(I should mention that Stewart was 47 when this movie came out, so he looks a bit long in the tooth to portray a pro athlete, even one who only has "a few good baseball years" left in him, as his character puts it.)

During his stint, Stewart meets other officers who were similarly forced back into service, and aren't too happy about it. Pretty bold stuff for the '50s. Eventually, of course, he sees the value in what he's doing and declines to return to baseball when his tour is up.

It's a gorgeous movie to look at, directed by Anthony Mann in widescreen with vivid Technicolor. Ultimately, it falls a bit flat because there's not much conflict to dramatize. Since there's no combat, Stewart's big dangerous missions consist of flying back and forth to Alaska and hoping the plane doesn't blow up.

I was also fascinated by the aerial footage of aircraft flying, tons and tons of it -- taking off, cruising, mid-air refueling. The movie is almost fetishistic in its portrayal of the machinery. I'm sure my father, who served in the Air Force during this period, and my father-in-law and brother-in-law, who were/are airline pilots, would probably enjoy all these flying scenes.

I knew about "They Were Expendable" but had sort of dismissed it in my mind as a typical wartime propaganda film -- sort of "The Green Berets" a generation earlier. I was surprised at how good the movie was, and gritty.

It's about the early days of the war in the Pacific, when things aren't going so well for the Navy. The film actually came out in December 1945, a few months after the war had wrapped up. I wonder what its reception would have been had such a bleak portrayal of American military failure come out while the fighting was still on.

To add to the misery, John Wayne and Robert Montgomery aren't big-time captains of destroyers or other battleships, but PT boat skippers -- tiny, fast boats that are dismissed by the Navy brass as useless toys. Most of the story has to do with the PT guys trying to prove that their boats have a role to play in the war.

The boats themselves are fascinating. They were about the size of a large speedboat; there was no belowdecks area except for the engine bay, so all the sailors stayed exposed up on the surface. PT stands for patrol torpedo, and in fact each boat carried four torpedoes in tubes attached to the top of the deck. I can only imagine how many PT boat crews got blown up when enemy fire hit their exposed torpedos.

There's a fair amount of combat scenes, and it's pretty gripping stuff, although John Ford had to resort to models and stock footage for the scenes where the big ships get blown up by the PTs.

Though it all, the PT squadron never gets any respect. They have to barter for materials and gasoline, and even blackmail a submarine captain into sharing some torpedoes with them. They get folded into the Army command, and eventually their squadron is disbanded and their boat hauled off on a truck to perform message duty.

The title of the movie itself is telling: "They were expendable." It's about the role of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers captured or killed at Bataan and Corregidor -- men whose job, in essence, was to sacrifice themselves to buy time for America to gear up for war.

Who knew ostensibly pro-military movies could offer such an honest and biting portrayal of life in a uniform? Not me, and I'm glad I learned this lesson.