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Samuel Fuller's battleground truthfulness is unimpeachable, the opening credits promise "an inspiring page of history" and he delivers death and disease and exhaustion. War is a dirty job pushed through to the end, thus the tale of the 5307th Composite Unit Provisional, three thousand men go in and one hundred come out. The Burma campaign in '44, "the cruelest jungle on earth." Merrill (Jeff Chandler) is a diligent officer with a bum ticker, the lieutenant protégé (Ty Hardin) runs a humanitarian parallel, their orders come from Stilwell himself (John Hoyt). No relief after Walawbum, no British replacements for the Yanks in the bush. "What's holding them up?" "The enemy, you meathead!" On to Shaduzup, swampy miles of malaria and starvation, where food dropped from planes becomes deadly bait. (A famished grunt ventures into the open field and is promptly gunned down, a white parachute covers the fresh corpse.) "Nobody looks okay to me," growls the outfit doctor (Andrew Duggan), who diagnoses "AOE: Accumulation of Everything." A variant of The Steel Helmet in Technicolor and CinemaScope, some of Fuller's harshest and tenderest moments despite studio truncation. Combat at the tank yard is superbly staged as a helter-skelter skirmish in a concrete maze, a soldier wanders dazedly across the jagged slabs in the smoky aftermath. A local village receives the depleted platoon, the gift of rice triggers the breakdown of the bearish sergeant (Claude Akins), vividly remembered by Boorman in Deliverance. Rifles at dawn in Myitkyina, silence around the rocky lagoon before an onslaught of screaming Japanese forces. An account for subsequent generations, "and if they don't cry, I'll beat the hell out of them." The imposed jingoistic coda can't dilute its grit. With Peter Brown, Will Hutchins, Pancho Magalona, Paul Edwards, Charlie Briggs, and Luz Valdez.
--- Fernando F. Croce |