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After the battered conquest (San Pietro), the haunted homecoming. The limbo of shell-shocked servicemen is presented as the painful daze that follows the nightmare, John Huston in a Long Island psychiatric facility documents a dozen or so "casualties of the spirit." Six to eight weeks from admission to discharge for the men who carry battleground terrors within themselves, the ward accommodates thousand-yard stares along with voices from the subconscious. Interviews, tests, recollections, group sessions. "All of us have our so-called breaking points..." Mental wounds lead to atrophied legs, a shot of sodium amytal and a bout of hypnosis have the grunt back on his feet, Dr. Benjamin Simon and editing at work. Another veteran can barely get a word out, on his back during the breakthrough he seems about ready to levitate away in jubilation. Sensitive emphasis on faces and a patient ear for broken speech patterns comprise Huston's approach, the impression of plain observation hinges on meticulous camera angles and tracks. (Stanley Cortez's study of solid blank walls comes in handy later for the gaping fissures of Shock Corridor.) The memory wiped clean by an explosion is restored at the doctor's office with a bit of time-traveling, the soldier in a trance finds himself quaking in an Okinawa foxhole. "A display of emotion is sometimes very helpful," so is carpentry, mandolins and baseball. The tacit irony is of trauma creating an egalitarian, racially integrated microcosm utterly at odds with the society into which the men hope to be accepted. "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" for the bus ride into town, the eponymous illumination turns out to be a doughboy "pretty grateful for getting my limbs back." Huston keeps chasing the neurotic miracle into Freud, reflections and influences extend from Zinnemann's The Men to Anderson's The Master. Narrated by Walter Huston. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |