DIRECTOR:
Sam Fuller
CAST:
Jeff Chandler, Ty Hardin, Andrew Duggan, Peter Brown, Claude Akins, Will Hutchins, Charlie Briggs, John Hoyt, Pancho Magolona, Vaughan Wilson, Chuck Roberson, Chuck Hayward and Jack C. Williams
REVIEW:
The best way to understand a man’s emotions are to look into his eyes. What does the look on his face tell you about his mood? Sam Fuller knows that. This is a movie about the faces of ordinary men in battle. What brings them joy, what makes them angry, what fatigues them. Fuller, a former soldier himself, knows how to convey these emotions in a way few filmmakers ever have been able to.
In 1944, “Merrill’s Marauders”, a group of American volunteers, trekked across Burma to destroy several key Japanese bases. There was a legitimate fear that the Japanese would trek through Burma to India and link up with Hitler’s forces in Europe. The Marauders played an important part in stopping this link-up, at great cost to their own lives.
The movie makes us understand what it must have been like to be a soldier in World War II. It’s important to realize that the Marauders were expecting a reprieve very early on the campaign, and were pushed far beyond normal physical and mental limitations to complete their mission. Merrill (brilliantly portrayed by Jeff Chandler) has a heart condition himself, but keeps it a secret from his men, who come to loathe him – until he collapses from a stroke, and they realize he has been pushing himself just as hard, if not harder than, his own troops.
Just what causes the stress they endure? First, the death of their friends. Lt. Stockton (Ty Hardin, in one of his best performances) expresses frustration at having to write letters home to the families of the dead in his platoon. Gradually, the number of families he must write to increases. The men left under his command are trudging through several hundred miles of swamp, fearing detection by the enemy at any given moment. They are without sufficient food, infected with malaria and typhus, and lack enough medical supplies. Then have to fight off or meticulously avoid every enemy unit they encounter. By the end of the film, every man we saw at the start with a clean shirt and freshly shaven face is either dead, or wearing tattered clothes, unkempt hair and most likely wounded or exhausted from disease. These are normal men who miss their homes and families, and want to go home badly – they don’t let the audience forget that, because it’s almost all they talk about – and rightly so.
Although some of the battle scenes seem sanitized compared to post 1965-standards (the usual fake-looking “seizure” death scenes, bloodless hand-to-hand combat), the aftermath is shockingly realistic and haunting. There is one scene in which Lt. Stockton slowly walks across a maze of concrete tank-traps, where a pitched close-quarters battle has just been fought, and sees and endless tangled mass of bodies – both American and Japanese.
Fuller lets his camera linger on these moments. There is one scene where Merrill gives an order to his subordinate and Fuller keeps the camera on the officer’s shocked and disappointed face for just long enough to let us start thinking about what is going inside the nameless man’s head. Likewise, he makes the Philippine locations come to vivid life, especially the dark, confined sequence in the swamp. Only a few scenes set in pine forests near the end of the film look jarringly out-of-place.
“Merrill’s Marauders” only weakness is in its almost forced jingoistic patriotism. The opening scene, a montage of documentary footage narrated by Andrew Duggan, sets us up for a flag-waving movie about American heroes single-handedly wiping out the Japanese Empire without effort, as has been seen in countless other war films. Likewise, the film’s conclusion speaks of the heroism and dedication of the Marauders as if they and the entire U.S. military were immortal saints. Oh, yeah, and the ridiculous music score.
Am I patriotic? Yes. Do I support the American military? Of course. Who makes a war movie web site in order to cut down war movies? I love ‘em. The body of the film is about ordinary fighting men and their dedication to eachother. Not to a cause. I’m sure that when men were in the trenches together during WWII (and any other war, for that matter) their primary dedication was to their buddy next to them, not for a glorious cause.
I have a soft spot in my heart because Frank Merrill was my grandmother’s cousin. So I have a bit of a tie to him and the history he and his men made, I suppose. That bit of prejudice doesn’t change the fact that this is a great movie, and deserves a DVD release A.S.A.P.
SGT. SLAUGHTER'S RATING:
4 Bullets
