Spiaggia rossa

Visually compelling and focused on the battles of a group of Marines and on men's determination to survive their tour of duty . Intense and bloody fight for an occupied Pacific island and shot in Philippines outdoors . This is a thought-provoking as well as exciting wartime film about a spectacular battle for an essential island on the Pacific toll in which a typical crew of Marines fighting the ¨Yellow Menace¨ and it considered to be by some reviewers one of the best American films about the Pacific conflict during WWII ; however , being sometime slow , boring but generally worthwhile . At the beginning the American Marines ashore on a Japanese-held island . As an US marine unit formed by Captain MacDonald (Cornel Wilde) , Sergeant Honeywell (Rip Torn) and Privates (Jaime Sánchez , Burr DeBenning , Patrick Wolfe) fight against the defenders of a Japanese held island , both sides are haunted by their own thoughts and memories ; as battle experience hardens soldiers . What follows are a series of bloody attacks , on the beach , jungles , mountains in which the rifle company fighting Japanese who hold killers gun-machines and other deadly weapons .

It is first hand account of a notorious battle on a Pacific island , and against an important base on a solitary atoll . Focusing on relationship between Capt. MacDonald/Cornel Wilde and his soldiers . Effectively portrays the dehumanizing psychological effects , battling soldiers on both sides are haunted by memories of home and the terrifying , sickening images they experience in combat , and using flashbacks by means of photos and images about their past existences . While the relationship between captain and his men makes the biggest impression and delivers the interesting main plot , among many sub-plots , some of which go nowhere . Interesting screenplay based on Peter Bowman's uniquely constructed novel "Beach Red" , it was published in 1945, near the end of World War II . The sequence in which Japanese troops tried to fool the US Marines by wearing their uniforms was taken directly from the source novel . This dark story produced/acted/directed by Wilde is immensely exciting , firmly characterized on its roles and in places very moving too . The film brings home the true horror of battle and the meaninglessness of it all and visually is stunning . Dealing with the inner thoughts , feeling and philosophical leaning of the soldiers , the picture sacrifices continuity to study several questions , utilizing records , memories and many other things . Combat images are naturally , well filmed and effective , getting spectacular scenes such as the impressive plane attacks on the ending . Atmospheric and evocative cinematography by Cecil Cooney . Sad and touching song sung by Jean Hagen , Cornel Wilde's wife . The movie has only one musical element , this song written by Antonino Buenaventura and it also is heard in other variations throughout the flick . Filmed in the Republic of Philippines and in Japan , the producer gratefully acknowledges the dedicated efforts and the cooperation of the entire cast , Department of National of Defense , the R.P. Marine Corps , the R. P. Navy , the R.P Army , the R.P Air Force , the R. P. Constabulary , the R.P. Research Institute , the R. P. Department of forest and a particularly the friendly and considerable people of the Philippines .

This harrowing motion picture was compellingly starred , written , produced and directed by Cornel Wilde , being released through United Artists . Wilde does a competent job both as actor and filmmaker . It's amazingly well done movie , being Cornel Wilde's best film . He is especially credited as a good actor but also known for directing some acceptable flicks . His later films were of varying quality, and he ended his career in near-cameos in minor adventure films . As he directed adventures as ¨Maracaibo¨ ,¨Lancelot and Guinevere¨, ¨Sharks' Treasure¨ but also Noir Cinema as ¨The Devil's Hairpin¨, ¨Storm Fear¨ and Sci Fi : ¨Blade of Grass¨. ¨Beach red¨ rating : 6.5/10 , good film , well worth watching . Essential and indispensable seeing for warfare fans . It's a good stuff for young people and war movie lovers who enjoy enormously with the extraordinary battles in the lush jungle.

Other fundamental tales based on Pacific landings were the followings : ¨Thin red line¨ by Andrew Marton with Keir Dullea and Jack Warden and ¨Thin red line¨ directed by Terence Malick with star-laden cast as Jim Cazievel as Private protagonist , Sean Penn as the Sergeant , and many others as George Clooney, Nick Nolte and Woody Harrelson . Furthermore , another important film about Guadalcanal battle turns out to be ¨Guadalcanal diary¨ by Lewis Seiler with Anthony Quinn , Preston Foster, Lloyd Nolan and Richard Conte .

This is a strange, moving and beautiful film. It bears a great ressemblance to the 98 Thin Red Line,( down to the colour of the tall grass and racial/social background of the officer )and yet they're both from novels by different authors. This is presumably a tribute by Malick.

What puts this film in very select company is its attitude to its subject. By its elegant use of stills, flashbacks, repetition and multiple voice-over it shatters the lie of the boys-own adventure and invites us to consider the combat as part of life. If in our experience of life someone takes to slaughtering someone else, it gives us pause for thought.

Accordingly, the usual overheated so-called 'dramatic' plot where everything is subjugated to the 'who wins?' question is replaced here by something subtler, reflective, one side certainly wins, but this occupies our thoughts little compared to feelings about what these men are engaged in.

I'd love to know the tradition this film springs from, it's not a a satire like 'Dr Strangelove'and it doesn't have the psychological portrait of 'Full Metal Jacket' thought it does have echoes in the later half of that film. The immediacy of the combat scenes is like the end section of 'On The Fiddle' with Sean Connery.

Beach Red looks with a rare, cool gaze at the war, this allows us to feel the emotion that is there. What a shame that Spielberg is too frightened to pay us that respect, instead the crass manipulation of fodder such as 'Ryan' stiffles the expression of any thought or feeling.

So it's great that they made Beach Red (and The Thin Red Line ) so that we can see there's more to the world!

I was really delighted to see the DVD of "Beach Red" in a video store last week, and of course I immediately bought it. I see that several commentators here have said something like "where did this come from, and how come I never saw it before?" Indeed, it's become something of a rare film over the years. I saw it in 1967 with my uncle, who was a World War II veteran who served in Europe. I was about 14 then, and its style, which was strikingly progressive for that time, made a deep impression on me. To me it seemed moody and dream-like, and it's been so long since I saw it, or even any discussion of it, that I almost felt as if I had dreamed seeing it in the first place. I was bowled over by it at the time. My uncle didn't care for it, as I think he expected a more traditional war film. He was one of those "sees things in black and white" types of guys, and though he didn't bother to explain it to me, I think the internal monologues, flashbacks, sexual encounters, and humanizing of the enemy in a war film just didn't wash with him.

Now, close to 40 years later, I finally saw it for a second time. I can see some clumsiness in the characterization and dialog that didn't strike me way back then. But I can also see why it seemed so audacious in 1967 as well. From my perspective, this was the first of what I would consider a "modern" war film that I experienced, and as such I tend to regard it as sort of a landmark. I can appreciate it more now as a pure ANTI-war film than I could back then, when it just struck me as strange, exotic, and titillating both for its sexual content and graphic violence. Just like the Sergio Leone spaghetti-westerns made traditional American westerns seem old-hat overnight, I could never look at traditional war films with the same eye again after seeing this back in 1967. I'm very glad to make its acquaintance again after all these years.

A fair screen performer, Cornel Wilde occasionally appeared in more interesting fare, such as the cult B-noir The Big Combo (1955), a title held today in greater esteem these days than his other mainstream successes. Of greater interest still is Wilde's career as a director that, with the tense drama of Storm Fear, started the same year as Combo. Although not a fully mature work, it still suggested some of the themes that would inform Wilde's later films: a concern with man confronting the elemental, whether externally or internally, and a fondness for extreme situations.

From the mid 1960s onwards Wilde made a remarkable trilogy of work in quick succession: The Naked Prey (1966), Beach Red, and No Blade Of Grass (1970), which are the films upon which his directorial reputation rests principally today. Each concerns a journey of one sort or another, in which men must differently face up to the primitive impulse within themselves as the comforting supports of civilised society stripped away. Thus in The Naked Prey a European is pursued by relentless natives across a bleak African wilderness. In No Blade Of Grass a party of English refugees and survivors have to navigate a post-catastrophe landscape. Beach Red sees soldiers face up to their innermost fears and regrets during the bloody battle for a Pacific island. Typically in Wilde's work, a stricken or unforgiving world reflects back the straits in which the main characters find themselves whilst any final resolution is, at best, ambivalent. In Beach Red this environment is lush and dangerous, full of both natural and human perils (at one point the director gives a litany of killer flora and fauna), but one where the greatest threat to man is Man himself.

Some critics have compared Wilde's cinema to that of Sam Fuller. Both forge personal cinema with an own, urgent vision. Fuller is the more assured stylist, with his tabloid-inspired contemplation of events. Wilde, too, often wears his message unashamedly on his sleeve - most obviously in the weaker No Blade Of Grass, or in some of the regretful soliloquizing of Beach Red. Like Fuller, Wilde produced and directed, but also scored and acted in two out three of his best works. (He's also heard as the narrator in the present film, and performs a similar function as a radio voice in No Blade Of Grass). Beach Red was the only one he also co-wrote, which leads one to think it had particular interest for the director. Unlike Fuller, Wilde never served in the armed forces. And unlike Fuller's war movies, Wilde's single martial opus is distinguished by its even-handedness. While the gritty realism and hard-wrought bravery of Wilde's soldiery is never in doubt the same, just, eye is applied to both sides.

The humans in uniform place the blame for the ensuing cruelty and pain not, as a rule, on individuals but on a wider commitment to duty, outside of any immediate questioning. When a soldier is guilty of any unnecessary cruelty, such as the Sergeant who breaks both the arms of a dangerous Japanese prisoner to subdue him, Captain MacDonald condemns the action outright. "We must never forget why we are killing...". In all of his major films Wilde's world is often cruel and hard - but never sadistic, his main characters determined, never cynical. MacDonald, John Custance, or the unnamed runner of The Naked Prey, do not manipulate others, but only try and survive, making the best of a bad world. (A difference in worldview that explains why Fuller made a string of excellent noir films while Wilde only made one.)

Those who have seen Saving Private Ryan will feel right at home here, and not just with the painful introspection of MacDonald as he struggles with duty. (Others have felt the flashbacks and narration anticipate Malick's The Thin Red Line, 1998.) Here, too, we see men dying in the water during a beach landing, pinned down beneath murderous machine gunfire, eviscerated, half burnt by flame throwers. Limb parts float in the water, while the young warrior 'Mouse' stands in horror, his arm ripped from his side. It's no romanticised version of war and the ending of Beach Red is less compromising than Spielberg's that, catering to different tastes, felt compelled to offer. More than in No Blade Of Grass, Wilde feels free to indulge in stylistic tricks and methods to achieve the peculiar dream-like intensity which accompanies combat experience, using stills, visual distortions, voiceovers and flashbacks. These highlight the interior life of his characters, some of these 'internalised' moments being almost as explicit and powerful as dynamic scenes elsewhere, such as during one of MacDonald's sensual reveries about his wife, when we see her presumably on the point of orgasm. There's sexual content too in the conversations between Private Egan (Burr de Benning) and minister's son Private Cliff (Patrick Wolfe), including at one point fantasising over a woman's torso fashioned from coconut shells and soil.

Memories of sensuality provides nostalgia for the soldiers. But Beach Red offers no real solutions to the horrors of war, and is unflinching. If MacDonald's supporting narration during combat is sometimes a little too matter of fact then this can be ascribed to Wilde's naiveté, in the best sense, as a director, an ongoing quality marking his best work. MacDonald, a lawyer by profession, is just a man who wants to get back to his wife. John Custance just wants to reach his brother's refuge in Scotland. 'The Man' in The Naked Prey just wants to elude his dogged pursuers. Characters are boiled down to essentials through their desires, offering a simple focus on key, almost primitive, issues in times of great adversity. When necessary, then narrator Wilde can provide the hand-on-heart commentary. This honesty means that we can overlook the odd cliché in his Beach Red, and enjoy it as one of the best war films.

First, let me ask, why isnt this available on video or dvd here in the States? They have it in Britain & Germany! Nevertheless Im glad to see this film making the rounds on Showtime and it's satellite cousins. I agree with previous posters that Spielberg 'HAD' to have watched this great film from the great Cornel Wilde, who incidentally plays the captain here. I originally watched this back in the 1980s on HBO and it, usually for years after, showed up on TNT during Memorial Day Weekend. But in the past few years I hadn't seen it until lately with these few Showtime airings. But back to the movie. Long before I had ever seen Saving Pvt Ryan I had just read the reviews of it. When the reviews talked about the opening sequence being extended pure assault, I knew that someone watched or knew of Beach Red. Both SPR & BR open in an almost identical fashion of pure armed violence. The only difference is the locale of the two pics. SPR on the beaches of Normandy and BR in a distant south pacific isle.

Beach Red covers a platoon from it's assault on a Japanese held beach, through the occupation of the island and finally to many of the members of Wilde's platoon losing their lives. This is bittersweet because we are taken, through flashback, to some instant in these soldiers personal lives. Wilde doesn't stop there. He also flashbacks the Japanese soldiers lives as well. This is great and considerate filmmaking as it humanizes boths sides, US & Japanese, withstanding the brutality of armed combat. This pic, unlike for instance 'The Longest Day', is filmed in rich colour. With the addition of colour in a war film this further personalizes the tragedy Wilde & his men have to go through in killing and staying alive. War is just as deadly on a bright and sunny day as it is on a gloomy or rainy type day. But Beach Red would have been a still very effective film had it been made in black & white.

For War Film buffs, I think many will be stunned by this movie when and if they have not seen it. It's always been a sort of low key picture undeservedly but thanks to home video & cable a couple of new generations will discover this unheralded classic. Wilde should have been very proud of his achievement in Beach Red, both as director & actor. And his supporting cast of the great Rip Torn as the gruff Sergeant and Burr DeBenning as the well meaning Yokel-Bumpkin are pure delight. A fine film from a fine cast. View it.