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The Pacific Theater's turning point, the poet's trial by fire. Midway Island, "our outpost... your front yard," the avian wildlife makes up the populace Japanese forces promise to "liberate." Marines silhouetted at sunset in the calm before the storm, "Red River Valley" on accordion. The imperial squadron materializes in the clouds, John Ford is there with camera in hand amid explosions. "Yes, this really happened." An "actual photographic report" of the battle, Technicolor on 16mm, eighteen impressionistic minutes at the center of the filmmaker's oeuvre. Tender portraiture for the home front, views of a young skipper dissolving to Mom and Dad back in the States. Moment of truth, machine-gunners and bombers during the attack, a crescendo of jagged mayhem. (Fierce blasts rattle the celluloid itself, indelibly.) Swooping planes, fireballs on the beach, sky blackened by smoke. Up the Stars and Stripes in the wreckage, "proof through the night that our flag was still there." Hymns and voices, narration by Donald Crisp and Irving Pichel, Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell as audience stand-ins. The search for survivors in the aftermath: "Get those boys to the hospital. Please do, quickly," the Red Cross lies beneath the rubble. Historical posterity fused to the frenzy of the moment, the Ford forte at its most crystalline. (The helmeted soldier crouched with binoculars is framed to evoke his own statue.) "Onward Christian Soldiers," funerals at sea, "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Flashes of the singular form are remembered by modernists to come, Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (a screen choked with flying debris) and Godard's La Chinoise (crimson paint smeared over text posters.) They Were Expendable offers an exhaustive exegesis of the experience.
--- Fernando F. Croce |