Battle Cry

It's not surprising many war veterans like this film. Dramatically framed with a voice-over by James Whitmore as the epitome of a Marine Sergeant who cares about his men but knows the mission is all, the film quickly draws us into the lives of these men and their women in a suspenseful and satisfying way. There is enough good acting by Whitmore, Van Heflin, Dorothy Malone, John Lupton and others to get us past the less well acted and more cliched moments. Some scenarios, such as the tragedy-to-triumph of the lumberjack womanizer(Aldo Ray)and the New Zealand farm widow (Nancy Olson)are superbly plotted and played. There are many memorable moments in the film and Uris' varied characters are well represented.(Please note that Navaho code-talkers are credited here.) Combat and training imagery and sound is generally high quality, but the outstanding aspect of the film is the way it explores the human qualities of those men and women who face the tests of war.

When the worst thing the drill instructor can call the new recruits at boot camp is "Meatheads", you know that the movie is pulling its punches. Not that I thought that about "Battle Cry" when I saw it at the age of nine in 1956 at the movies, then I lapped up every minute of this film devoted to those most cinematic of warriors - the US Marines.

The years have not been kind to "Battle Cry". It has dated in a way that "From Here to Eternity" has not. However it seems that many WW2 veterans like this film. They seem less critical of it than younger reviewers, and it's hard to argue with people who actually lived it rather than viewed it. To be honest, "Battle Cry" seems more truthful to the spirit of the marines of WW2 than a movie such as "Windtalkers" with all its gore and false heroics.

Leon Uris wrote the novel based on his experiences with the marines during the war. It contained passages that were thrilling, funny and outrageous. The book's description of boot camp and the lustiness of the marines pulled no punches at all. But 1950's censorship made the movie a different matter.

The story follows a group of marines from the time they head to boot camp until their return from battle in the Pacific. So many characters are introduced that some of them emerge as overly familiar stereotypes, but Tab Hunter and Aldo Ray hold their own. Although James Whitmore's performance as Mac, the master sergeant, is convincing, his narration often comes across as trite and intrusive.

The movie concentrated as much on the encounters in the bedroom as on the battlefield, split evenly between the women the boys leave behind and the ones they find on their way to war with Nancy Olsen giving the strongest performance as the New Zealand widow who falls in love with Aldo Ray's character.

The movie becomes more focused when the recruits pass through boot camp and join the battalion that takes them to war. Van Heflin as Major Huxley, the commanding officer, gives the standout performance in this film, providing the right combination of toughness and compassion as the professional given the job of moulding boys into marines. His performance goes a long way towards counteracting the negatives in "Battle Cry".

The film's best sequence begins when Huxley pushes his men to outperform another battalion in a gruelling cross-country hike in New Zealand. After reaching their destination, he decides to do the return journey as well, pushing the men to their limits. When it seems they can't continue, the other battalion passes them on their way back mounted on trucks. The sight galvanises Huxley's men and resentment turns to pride as they march on bloodied feet back to camp. "When we hit that camp gate, let's give 'em a look at the best outfit in the Corps", exhorts Huxley as his men swing past to the accompaniment of Max Steiner's rousing score.

Unlike music for war films of the last 30 years or so, which invariably play to the pathos and tragedy of war, Steiner went for the glory. Steiner's original marching song, "Honey Babe", provides an enduring memory of the film.

"Battle Cry" delivers its major battle at the end. The landing on Saipan is well staged if somewhat confusing, but it leads to an emotional ending as the surviving marines return home.

The success of "Battle Cry" indicated that audiences of the day needed the reassurance of some core values: honour, duty, patriotism and sacrifice. "Battle Cry" over-delivered on those qualities. Vietnam was still ten years away, and then the generation brought up on movies like this would face some harsh realities of their own.

It is difficult to recommend "Battle Cry" to a broad audience today. But with that said, it does boast a number of fine performances and a sequence or two that stay in the memory.

To those who insist that only the gore shown in films such as 'Saving Private Ryan' gives a genuine cinematic portrayal of the experience of war I say: Put up or shut up: ENLIST! Because 'Battle Cry' tells what most of the experience of the service in and out of war consists of: the loneliness of a man among strangers in barracks; the in-your-face, gratuitously belligerent bastards in barracks who get on everyone's already put-upon nerves; the long aching separations from family and girlfriends, wives and lovers; the monotonously contemptible chow; the soul- and mind-frustrating sheer bloody boredom of living in barracks, performing mindless repetitive tasks, and having always to "hurry up and wait" or to be roused from temporary respite to have to get up and at 'em all over again for the ten-thousandth wearying time; the having to take crap from foul-mouthed, mean, nasty sonsabitches whose only claim to authority is one more stripe than yours on their uniform. Those are just the monotonous low-lights of daily life behind-the lines. Up on the lines it gets worse. A lot worse. And then just having to live in icy muck or tropical insect swarms suddenly gets much worse when the you-know-what hits the fan: when a soldier has to go into the attack or to defend against sudden enemy attack - so that his life of monotonous discomfort and privation is now punctuated by brief, terrifying spasms of violence few of us can even begin to imagine.

This is why you hear combat veterans say things such as, "All the rest is gravy," because even the long, endless days and nights of soul-numbing monotony of barracks and drill and K.P. and loneliness are preferable to the terrors of battle - and even to the filth and privation of just trying to live on a quiet sector's front line. This is why 'Battle Cry' shows more of the daily, drudging experience of actual marines than those war films crammed with combat sequences ever show.

'Battle Cry' tells the truth that men in war are bored, lonely, chafed, irritated, often disgusting and disgusted, irritating, sh_t-upon constantly by every last ugly nasty bastard wearing one stripe more than you get to wear, and isolated in a big ugly, mean, bored, crowd whose members they didn't get to choose as company. Also, no one, except the very few top brass strategist-commanders, gets to choose his destination or his daily tasks: so that every day, every heartbeat, you feel very, very small, utterly insignificant and powerless almost all of the time, every day, every night, every time some mess cook slops a glob of something you'd never have ordered and which you'd never have otherwise forked into your mouth onto your baby-like (you are, after all, powerless) compartmented chow tray to there commingle with the other globs of slop already commingled on it. You just wish that someone would recognize you, single you out, maybe treat you as an individual, value you as a unique person who needs only to be himself - and not just a service number or a cog in a uniformly drab, communally responsive colonial animal-machine - to merit such simple attention and care. I heard many - men and women in the service - express simply: "I wish I were anywhere but here."

Go and hang out just outside a military or naval base and see the clip-joints, the hucksters, the whores who pitilessly roll drunken soldiers and sailors as soon as they'd light their next cigarette; let your eyes take in the fleecing tailor shops, the used car salesmen finagling their way to your very slender paycheck, the loan sharks, the gamblers fixing card and crap games to bilk servicemen, the drug dealers seeking to sell you God-knows-what-that-sh_t-might-be, the strip bars, the swarms of Mary Jane Rottencrotches who habituate soldiers' and sailors' bars, eager to marry a combat-bound serviceman just to get their names on the poor bastard's GI life insurance policy. It's only beyond this circus of lovely attractions that you find the nice clean, orderly, middle class residential districts whose patriarchs and matriarchs don't want you in their neighborhood - and want your sailor or Marine or soldier ass far away from their young daughters or their smart-assed college kid sons. These are the people and the institutions which you, the serviceman and servicewoman, face and wade through when the Powers That Be do let you out of the monotonous, soul-vacuuming confines of your barracks and the Daily Routine.

Yet the men and women in America's wars stuck it out, pulled together when they had to, and they deserve every respect for their endurance, grit, applied imagination, and courage. These experiences and qualities and the men who met such challenges to their spirit and flesh 'Battle Cry' shows in spades; and it also shows the experiences of women separated to toil alone in constant anxiety for their own and their children's' or their husbands's day-to-day welfare - for all of their loved ones whose experience and fate they can't directly influence. let alone improve. 'Battle Cry' shows the men and the women as human beings, as individuals caught up in what General Eisenhower rightly called "a Great Crusade." Only to the little people in it, it didn't resemble a Great Crusade; to them it looked like a hopeless, disorganized, screwed-up shambles: read Bill Mauldin's inimitable book of his WWII cartoons, and you begin to grasp how repulsive and exhausting, frightful and ludicrous that Crusade was for the poor bloody infantrymen. Or you can watch 'Battle Cry.'

My rating of Battle Cry has more to do with my disappointment with the plot than the actually quality of the movie. I knew nothing of the movie before I watched it, but with a name like Battle Cry, I was expecting a war movie along the lines of Battleground (with which it is paired in the double feature DVD I bought). Instead, Battle Cry has more in common with a soap opera than a real war movie. The movie spends over two hours of its time on relationships and love affairs. When the real battle scenes finally begin, they're over and done with in less than 10 minutes. That's not to say I didn't enjoy the stories of the Marines and their women, it's just not what I was expecting.

I am sure that on repeat viewings my enjoyment of the movie and rating I've given it will increase. Most of the movie is very well done. Like most other reviews I've read, I am especially fond of the scenes involving Pfc Andy Hookens (Aldo Ray) and Pat Rogers (Nancy Olson). I found it a very believable, heartfelt story that's played perfectly by both actors. The rest of the cast is solid and their plot lines are almost as enjoyable.

I was shocked at the frank presentation of some of the subject matter in Battle Cry. I can't think of another movie from the 50s, especially a flag-waving war movie, where sex, pregnancy, drinking, and adultery are dealt with so openly. It's a nice change-of-pace from the sanitized WWII movies I've come to expect.

As I recall, our small town's prestige theater was packed, even to the back row of the balcony where I had to sit. But who cared. Word was that shapely Dorothy Malone (Elaine) did a strip tease in a chair, and just the thought of a girl bra-less on screen was enough to bring out every horny high school guy in town. Plus, the title promised all the neat battle scenes that teens in the '50's confused with real war. I don't think any of us were disappointed after leaving the theatre. Then again, a little Malone skin went a long way.

Seeing the movie again, I realize how many years have passed and how people change. Now the 2-hours-plus seem tedious and transparent, a typical Hollywood whitewash of the time, with stock characters and clichéd situations. It's like the producers wanted to touch every boy-girl base possible, and they do. I'm just puzzled the movie wasn't titled "Mating Cry" since that's where the screen time really is; only the last 10-minutes or so involve battle scenes and that amounts to either artillery explosions or fixing bayonets.

I'm sure enlistments went up following the film's release. Looks like Warner Bros. got maximal assistance from the Corps at Camp Pendleton—lots of massed troop scenes and colorful beach landings. And why not since the film's sum total plays like a recruitment poster. The trouble is this was just this type of Hollywood hokum that helped create the disconnect 10-years later between what Americans expected in Vietnam and the stark realities of what they got. And therein lies the irony of that long ago theater night—the glamorized deceptions of a Battle Cry plus its many 50's kin ended up costing a lot of folks more than what they paid at the box office.