Gung Ho

I thought it was interesting that Carlson claims in the beginning that he was with Mao Tse Tung on his Long March. Apparently, Carlson takes the skills and lessons that he learned from the Red Army in Guerilla Warfare and trains a couple of hundred bad boy Americans how to kill and throw themselves on barb wire. The first half of the film follows the training and even has time for a bit of a love story with Noah Beery Jr. (best known from "Rockfile Files" perhaps).

The second half involves a submarine ride and a raid on an island held by the Japanese. The action is surprisingly intense. Some scenes, like the shooting of Japanese out of trees reach the level of brutal poetic metaphor. These action scenes detail fierce fighting and are surprisingly even handed with both American and Japanese troops biting the dust pretty regularly.

Unlike, "Walk in the Sun" where the audience is given the chance to know and care about each soldier, there is only a pretty stereotyped introduction and then they are molded into one tough killing machine. The title "Gung Ho" we learn means "harmonious work" and that is what we get with precision maneuvers and no hesitation in the face of death on the battlefield.

One could call this communist propaganda, but without films like this, could fascism East and West have been defeated?

Of the two Marine Raider Battalions made famous by their exploits at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, Edson's First and Carlson's Second, the Second was by far the ideologically weirdest. Both were thought of -- and thought of themselves -- as elite units, but in many ways they couldn't have been more different. Edson was a by-the-book military man who took marinehood several powers beyond the norm. They were looked at askance by other members of the military. Edson's emphasis was on combat performance locked into a rigidly authoritarian cast structure.

But Carlson's (here Thorwald's)background, temperament, and training methods were revolutionary, in a literal sense. Between the wars, Carlson had taken a kind of vacation from the Marine Corps and spent it studying the Chinese Communists and learning from them, especially the development of what they called "Gung Ho," which translates as something like "good public spirit" but has been degraded in meaning over the years until, when I was in the military, it had all the pejorative value of "chickenshit." Carlson was a committed leader, openly concerned about his men's welfare, what William James would have called "tender minded." His outfit, men and officers alike, lived together in both training and combat, suffered the same hardship, ate the same food, held bellyaching sessions in which anyone could say anything, good or bad, about anyone else, as close as you get to group therapy. The movie soft pedals much of this, and God forbid the word "communism" should be spoken aloud.

The Raider Battalion's most famous engagement was the raid of Makin Island in the Gilberts (pronounced more like "Moggin" than what it looks like). It wasn't the unqualified success the picture gives us. After the rubber boats reached shore and the attack was initiated, resistance increased and it looked like the raid would fail, so Carlson called for a retreat back to the boats. Unfortunately, as Carlson had foreseen, the heavy surf flooded outboard engines and overturned many of the craft, drowning numbers of men. As it turned out, however, the Japanese had more or less disappeared and the mission was accomplished, except that nine of the men who had not been killed in combat or drowned had gotten lost in the dark or wound up on another atoll. They were later rounded up, taken to Kwajalein and beheaded.

The raid did no long-term damage except to convince the enemy that the Gilberts would soon be invaded (which was true) and that fortifications should be reinforced (which they were). I love this movie. It has every cliché in the book. Brawling rivals, a Jewish sidekick called "Transpawt" by Randolph Scott, treacherous Japs, stupid Japs, Marines throwing knives with deadly accuracy, one of our boys can beat a dozen of theirs, explosions galore filling the air with flying balsa wood, bayonets, judo, interesting rifle-shot sounds, Japanese pilots giggling maniacally while they unknowingly slaughter their own soldiers -- ding hau!

The crowning moment: Colonel Thorwald begins one of those patriotic speeches about how we have to win the war, and the peace that will follow too, and turns mid-way through the speech and looks directly through the camera lens at the wartime audience, and the image on screen becomes a sinking ship flying a Japanese flag. Could there be anything better if you're seeking patriotic laughs from a movie? Shortly after Guadalcanal, the Raider Batallions were both disbanded, the Corps believing that since every Marine was elite anyway the Corps had no need for whole outfits of them.

A lot has been said about this picture's outrageous jingoism, and that's a valid point, but this wasn't intended to be a history lesson (although it's based on a true story), it was made as propaganda to further the war effort, and at that it succeeds. It's quite well made, the battle scenes are exciting and very well done, and it probably did what it was intended to do, which was to give the public something to feel good about; in 1943 the war wasn't going all that well for the Allies. Robert Mitchum was starting to get bigger parts about this time; he has a fairly substantial part here, and his laconic style is quite evident. Some of the dialogue is a bit difficult to get past (one soldier says he wants to join the unit that is being put together to raid a Japanese-held island because "I just don't like Japs"), and some of the heroics are a bit much, but overall it's no worse, and a bit better, than many of the war pictures to come out of Hollywood around that time.

This film, made in 1943, doesn't even try to hide its purpose. It's propaganda, pure and simple. Several scenes are shot and narrated in a documentary type of mode. The film was shot only months after the actual events took place. Randolph Scott was a good actor, but they threw this together so quickly that he didn't have time to do a decent job. Young (and I mean YOUNG) Robert Mitchum is the best actor in the film and he isn't nearly up to his usual standards. The story is good, and I believe that, given the language constraints of 1943, the film is as well written as it could be. The battle sequences are fair. There's a good bit of obvious choreography in the hand-to-hand scenes. Overall, judged against other films of its type, this one isn't too awful bad.

Other reviewers have published some excellent critiques of this 1943 war-action film from the perspective of the military and military history. Given the subject matter - the introduction of guerilla tactics to the Marine Corps - the historic perspective is particularly important. Though I am no stranger to either perspective, I am going to discuss Gung Ho strictly from the perspective of its genre - military action.

Though loaded with clichés such as rousing pre-battle speeches and over-dramatized death scenes, Gung Ho tells a more-or-less true story about the successful deployment of the Makin Raiders (Carlson's Raiders) on a minor Japanese stronghold (Makin Atoll). Fifteen thousand men volunteer, and in the end, only 200 make the team. These two hundred men will adopt the Chinese phrase Gung Ho (roughly translated as working harmoniously) as a philosophical approach to the task at hand.

In the military action film tradition, we are briefly introduced to each of the men whose battle experience will form the central action later in the film. The characters are surprisingly well-developed and realistic, but the laundry-list approach to character development doesn't work very well in terms of pace and cinematography. Once deployed, the Makin Raiders immediately spring into action, employing intelligence, an unusual degree of individual initiative, and great courage, to challenge the overwhelming odds against their capture of the island of Butaritari in the Makin Atoll.

The action sequences are quite entertaining, nicely thought-out, and the effects are brilliantly executed. From a pure action perspective, the film rates high for its time. The cinematography is quite good, the acting is OK, but hampered by some very mediocre directing. The early appearance of later legend Robert Mitchum is noteworthy, and Mitchum, even this early in his career, dominates every scene he is in.

Gung Ho, however, has been justly accused of propagandism and jingoism, as well as historical inaccuracy. Overall, given the fact that this film was released in 1943 within months of the securing of Guadalcanal by U.S. forces, this is hardly surprising.

From a civilian perspective, it's really just a 'pretty good' war film.