Prima dell'uragano

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 perspective of this movie is that of a Navy veteran of World War II. My ship landed Marines on Iwo Jima and I witnessed the flag over Mount Suribachi. I take exception to some who do not consider this realistic enough, but it was made in 1955 and for its time I thought the combat scenes were adequate. I read Leon Uris' book Battle Cry long before I saw the movie. He was there in the Pacificduring World War II not in some office in Hollywood and not long after the question of whether or not we would prevail was yet finalized. He mentions in his book and it is also mentioned in the movie that when the Marines left New Zealand they "boarded the ships known as the Unholy Four." Well, I served on USS President Jackson, an attack transport which landed the first Marines in an American offensive in WWII and this was 7 August 1942 at Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. An hour later the USS President Adams landed the first troops of Guadalcanal. These two ships plus the USS President Hayes and USS Crescent City made up what was known by sailors and Marines throughout the Pacific as the "Unholy Four." So, you see, Leon Uris knew a heck of a lot more about what went on in the Pacific than latter day critics of this movie whom I doubt were ever in the military let alone in the Pacific during WWII. I enjoyed the story, the characters, the love story woven through the plot. I and many veterans could well relate to a Marine on leave falling in love with a New Zealand girl and then going off to fight and returning in bad shape. Hey,pals of today, you really don,t have any idea of such things unless you experienced them. The battle scenes were not gory and perhaps not realistic; if they were you wouldn't be able to sit in the theatre without throwing up. The two Navajo indians portrayed were used to show how the Marines used the Navajo Codetalkers to thwart Japanese trying to listen in on their communications. Recently two real live Navajo Codetalkers where given medals at the White House and there is another movie to come out about the Code Talkers. The idea that a Marine Colonel might spend a long time training troops and then not being allowed to take them into combat may seem idiotic but if you trained hard for a long, long time for a job you wanted to get it done, at least that was they way men felt in those days. The training sequences were in my opinion quite good and showed how Marines were shaped into combat readiness. The story line about some of the Marines reflected just a little about the diverse nature of servicemen during the war. There were no blacks in the movie because during WWII all military services were segregated although the Navy had black mess cooks aboard ship. Whether you like it or not that was the real way it was then. The movie has James Whitmore as a top sergeant and does a fine job with one memborable scene when the Colonel asks if he is going to stay on base or base with the Old Man. He replies, "T think I'll go to town and see ikf I can scare up an Old Woman." He had previously done a fine job as a Sergeant with 101st Airborne in Battleground, in my opinion another very good war movie. Well, the movie ends with the Marines back hom on leave and what do they see as they get off the train but a newspaper with the big black headline: "Marines on Iwo Jima." If anyone thought this was a lousy movie they are entitled to their opinions, but for me, I say, "Tell it to the Marines!"

For those of us who lived thru the War, BATTLE CRY is a splendid multi story Marines in Love and War drama, masterfully overseen by veteran Raoul Walsh, with a career perf by Aldo Ray, backed with fine work from Van Heflin, James Whitmore, Tab Hunter, Nancy Olson and others in a star cast. A huge box office hit from an equally big bestseller, marking a vast improvement on the book. Sentimental, exciting, plausible, involving and thoroughly entertaining; its 149 minute running time paced properly, unlike today's bloated epics, which seem to embrace overlength as a substitute for content and skill. Unlike Spielberg's yawner, CRY didn't need to resort to F/X bloodbaths to awaken the audience's attention.

I saw BATTLE CRY on Feb. 19, 1955 at the Laurel Theatre in San Carlos, a Saturday night at the movies in an Art Deco suburban house. Maybe you have to be 66 to appreciate this film for what it represents; and maybe you need to be 26 to swallow Spielberg's version of D-Day. I'll stick with 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.