Reeling Backward: "Back to Bataan" (1945)

I've enjoyed writing this column for many reasons, but one has been discovering Golden Age war films that are much more nuanced and anti-war than I would have given credit for.

"Back to Bataan" is not one of them.

This creaky, stolid picture stars John Wayne as Col. Joseph Madden, an Army officer tasked with leading the insurgency in the Philippine Islands after General MacArthur was forced to withdraw, leaving tens of thousands of American soldiers in captivity at the cruel hands of the Japanese and their atrocities -- most famously, the Bataan Death March.

The march itself is briefly depicted in the film, but includes the movie's most curious moment. Andres Bonifacio, a captain and grandson of the Philippine's greatest hero, is among the prisoners. The Japanese soldiers are shooting or bayoneting any prisoner who falls or attempts to escape.

Bonifacio stumbles off the trail but passes out before he can reach safety. A Japanese soldier hovers him, preparing to stab him through, but then intentionally thrusts his bayonet harmlessly into the ground between Bonifacio's legs, looking around to see if anyone saw him. The man is then pulled into the jungle by the insurgents.

Now, why in the world would a Japanese soldiers spare this man? Did he know about Bonifacio's ancestry, and the ability of his surname to rally the people? Or was it simply the rare example of kindness amidst the atrocities? Either way, it needed to be explained.

Bonifacio is played by Anthony Quinn, the Irish/Mexican actor whose swarthy good looks allowed him to portray virtually every ethnicity in the movies, from Arab to Italian to Greek to Filipino.

Wayne's doing his usual big-hero shtick, leading other men through the sheer force of his personality -- and the explicit threat that he'll personally beat them senseless if they fail to obey.

The Japanese are portrayed in the usual way of World War II propaganda -- smiling while killing innocents, big glasses, etc. I know a war was one, but it's still sickening to watch this vile stuff so many years later. It makes you wonder: In German or Japanese war films of the era, are Americans depicted as big, gangly evildoers? Do they wear cowboy hats as they gun down innocent Germans? I'd love to know.

The other interesting thing about "Back to Bataan" is the explicitly heroic light in with the Filipinos are depicted. They are continually praised as brave, loyal and fiercely independent. One character, a young boy named Maximo who continually helps Madden and his troops, is beaten by the Japanese into revealing their location, but he sacrifices himself by steering the troop carrier into a ravine.

In his dying breath, Maximo apologies to his stodgy old white schoolteacher (Beulah Bondi) for misspelling "liberty" with a "u." She clutches his body, crying out that even if he couldn't spell it, no one better understood the meaning of the word.

It's a seriously corny moment in an underwhelming war picture.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "In Which We Serve"

"In Which We Serve" starts off as an annoyingly British bit of World War II propaganda. You know the type -- lots of really fast talking, airy upper-crust accents, and stiff upper lip type of bravery.

In the first scene the H.M.S. Torrin is fatally crippled by a German dive bomber. After the captain -- played by Noel Coward, who also wrote the screenplay, co-directed, produced, wrote the musical score and, I think, personally provided all the catering -- gives the order to abandon ship, he and the other survivors give the sinking vessel three cheers.

The first half of the film is also filled with many cutaway scenes of the sailors' personal lives back home -- saying hello and goodbye to their wives, meeting soon-to-be wives, etc. They happen so rapidly that there's more smoochy time than fighting for a good long while, a when you're expecting a good ripping war movie, one feels like quoting the little kid from "The Princess Bride": "They're kissing again!"

But as the picture wore on I found myself liking it more and more. As the captain and his crew cling to a life raft awaiting rescue as German fighter planes strafe them, picking off more and more of them, they reflect on their lives aboard the Torrin, how it shaped them, and how they struggled to maintain that famously imperturbable English facade.

This was the only movie that Coward directed, reportedly at the behest of Winston Churchill himself, who was friend of the prolific playwright/composer. Coward decided he needed an able assistant to lean on, and chose a fellow named David Lean, who'd done some assistant directing and gained a reputation as a top-notch editor. Lean insisted on being listed as co-director, so "In Which We Serve" marks the first time Lean was credited as a director.

A number of young British actors have small roles in this picture, including James Donald and a very young Richard Attenborough, making his screen debut as a sailor who loses his nerve during a fight and deserts his post. Despite not receiving a screen credit, Attenborough has a considerable amount of screen time, including a great scene where the captain addresses his cowardice in front of the entire crew without naming him.

The battle scenes are a bit hammy -- there wasn't a lot of resources to put into a war picture in 1942, as one might imagine. So Coward/Lean rely upon a lot of stock footage that is only haphazardly woven together.

As I say, the second half of the film contains many very moving moments. The biggest impact is the scene in which Shorty Blake (John Mills), a low-ranking seaman, receives a letter from his wife.

She had been staying at the house of the chief petty officer when it was bombed, killing the officer's wife and mother. Blake goes up to the mess to let the chief, Hardy (Bernard Miles), know that the only members of his family were killed. His own wife was unhurt, and successfully gave birth to a baby boy. So the chief, in the midst of his own grief, congratulates the seaman for becoming a father.

What a moment -- and just one reason why I left "In Which We Serve" much more impressed than when I started.

3.5 stars

The Bridges at Toko-Ri

The Korean War has been called "the forgotten war," and the 1955 film "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" is an early look at the disillusionment of the men who fought it.

As I've discovered more war pictures from the 1940s and '50s, I've been struck by how anti-war -- and often downright cynical -- they can be. Most people consider the Golden Age of cinema an era of unquestioning patriotism when it came to movies about armed conflict. But in point of fact, filmmakers were quite capable of delivering harsh, sobering glimpses of war.

William Holden plays Harry Brubaker, a Navy lieutenant pilot who as the story opens is forced to ditch his jet in the ocean when he runs out of fuel returning from a mission. He nearly dies in the frozen sea, but is saved by the plucky rescue helicopter pilot Mike Forney, memorably played by Mickey Rooney.

We soon learn that -- like the Jimmy Stewart character in "Strategic Air Command" -- Brubaker was a reservist called back up to active duty, and he's none too thrilled about it. He had a successful law practice going, a wife (Grace Kelly) and two young daughters. Now he's risking his neck doing bomb runs over a country most Americans back home couldn't find on a globe.

Fredric March has a great role as the grizzled old Navy admiral who brutally assesses his men's grit and abilities while also extending a paternal hand to Brubaker. He sees much of his dead son in the brash young pilot, and even looks the other way when Brubaker's wife brings his family to Japan to see him, despite regulations to the contrary.

The film is based on a book by James Michener, based on his real experiences with an air command unit in 1951-52. The bridges of Toko-Ri are fictitious, but based on some real key bridges in the North Korean mountains that American air forces badly wanted to destroy.

The flight scenes are thrilling and realistic -- the film won an Academy Award for special effects -- but director Mark Robson doesn't romanticize the notion of combat or fetishize all the military gear. It's simply the backdrop to a great story about warriors that is less concerned with the war in which they find themselves.

There are numerous references to the war being a wasted effort, and something of which the Americans safe at home are barely even cognizant -- pretty radical stuff in late 1953 and early 1954, when the film was made.

I rather liked the Mike character, and how Rooney played him. He's an impish little hot-headed Irishman, who's an ace behind the yoke of a chopper but hell on wheels on land. He gets thrown in the clink when he learns his Japanese girl fell for another sailor while he was at sea, resulting in a huge brawl. Brubaker bails him out, and Mike eventually makes it back onto the ship, but not before nearly getting thrown in jail twice more.

Mike wears a bright green tophat and scarf while he's piloting his helicopter, despite the consternation of the captain. Mike is an interesting character, who flourishes in the tightly regimented society of the Navy, despite being a born hellraiser.

Brubaker becomes unnerved when a second low-fuel scenario nearly ends with him ramming his plane into a huge crane on the landing deck of his "flat top" -- aircraft carrier. He starts to lose his nerve as the big Toko-Ri mission approaches. But he does OK in the end.

The film ends with Brubaker and Mike dying in a muddy irrigation ditch in a Korean field. Brubaker completed his mission but took flak damage, and had to crash-land. Mike comes to rescue him but his helicopter is damaged.

"The wrong war in the wrong place, and that's the one you're stuck with," Brubaker intones just before perishing. It's a grim, unglamorous portrait of war, and one well worth catching.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "The Steel Helmet"

I wonder what the cinematic heroes of most World War II movies would make of Sgt. Zack, the protagonist of 1951's "The Steel Helmet."

Zack has guts, but he's certainly not what you would call heroic. His biggest priority is making it out of combat alive. He's gruff, insulting and racially insensitive. When a South Korean boy saves his life, he calls him a "gook."

"Steel Helmet" was released just a few months into the fighting of the Korean War, and was the first Hollywood movie made about that conflict. Writer/director/producer Samuel Fuller shot it in just 10 days for a little over $100,000 -- peanuts, even in 1952. According to legend, Fuller wrote the script in one week.

The story opens with a static image of a soldier's helmet. Eventually, the helmet rises and we see the eyes and then the face of the man wearing it. Zack is bound by the hands and by all rights should be dead. After his unit surrendered, the GIs were tied up and shot. A bullet pierced Zack's helmet, but just grazed his head. His left leg was not so lucky, taking a direct hit. But he was left for dead, and after the Korean boy rescues him, Zack's only mission is to make it back to headquarters in one piece.

The boy is played by William Chun, and is quickly dubbed "Short Round" by the bearded, limping sergeant. It seems likely that Steven Spielberg borrowed the moniker for his sidekick in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."

Sgt. Zack is played by Gene Evans in one of his first film roles; he would go on to a long and healthy TV and movie career playing cops and tough guys.

I was astonished to learn that Evans was just 29 years old when he made this movie. His grizzled features and the world-weary slump of his shoulders bespeak a man decades older. But going to war ages a man, physically, mentally and in his soul. The scars he wears on the outside are just mild reflections of the ones inside.

Not that Zack doesn't have his external scars, too. When he first meets with a black medic named Thompson (James Edwards), the latter comments that he must have been injured in the mouth at some point. Zack nods and says he was hit by an "88" on D-Day. In his own inimical way, Zack indicates he had surgeries to repair his mug.

"Most of my back(side), I'm wearing on my face. When my face gets tired, I sit down."

The threesome meet up with a tattered platoon on their way to establish an O.P. -- observation post -- at a nearby Buddhist temple. One of the notable things about "Steel Helmet" is that the actors use real soldier lingo, and it's up to the audience to pick up on the meaning of various phrases.

The lieutenant (Steve Brodie) asks Zack to come along to help school his squad of greenhorns, but is refused. Zack makes no attempt to hide his contempt for the young officer, who lacks field experience. Zack himself is a "retread" -- a soldier who also served in WWII. Thompson is also a retread, as is the squad's bazooka man, a Japanese-American named Tanaka (Richard Loo).

After Zack and Tanaka bail out the group from a sniper attack, he agrees to see them as far as the temple in exchange for a box of cigars one of the men is toting.

In perhaps the film's most shocking scene, the soldier with the cigars discovers an American body, and is ordered by the lieutenant to search it. Zack, slurping his words around a rind of melon from a patch they'd stumbled upon, lazily discourages such an action. When the soldier does search the body, he's blown up by a booby trap. Zack shows absolutely no remorse for the death of the man, only asking if he had his pack on him when he died. When he learns the pack is still at camp, Zack brusquely rifles through it for his cigars.

Eventually they reach the temple, where a North Korean major is hiding out. After killing one of the men and trashing their radio, the enemy soldier is captured. Zack eagerly looks forward to marching the prisoner back to headquarters for interrogation, which he figures will earn him a furlough. But when Short Round is killed by a sniper and the major taunts him about his affection for the boy, Zack angrily shoots the unarmed prisoner, mortally wounding him.

At the center of Zack's ethos is maintaining composure under fire. When he was about to leave with his prisoner, the lieutenant asked to exchange helmets with Zack for his bullet-ridden one, figuring it will bring luck. The sergeant refuses, letting the "lou" know that he may be wearing stripes, but he hasn't earned them yet.

Of course, Zack himself loses his cool in the film's climactic firefight, dropping his weapon and hazily wandering around, muttering something about krauts. Here, at the height of battle, the "hero" of the movie suffers from a post-traumatic stress flashback.

It's not the sort of depiction you expect out of a war hero, but that's why "The Steel Helmet" stands apart from other war movies of its era. Like "Battleground," reviewed here a few months ago, this movie is more interested in seeing through a soldier's eyes than glorifying him.

3.5 stars