Battle Cry

This is one of the best of a whole slew of WW2 films that were made in the 50's, some others of which are also very good. This one stars Aldo Ray and James Whitmore, a young Tab Hunter and others destined to become stars. The action scenes are all done pretty well in most of these films and this one is no exception. By today's standards, there are no real special effects, but what little are in the film are state-of-the-art for the time. This film should be seen to appreciate what our soldiers, sailors and marines did for us in WW2.

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.

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.'

Let me start by saying I really enjoyed this film and have watched it perhaps a half dozen times. The comments by Mr. Glassey do seem unfair to me. This movie doesnt show us the guts and bloodshed and realism that is accepted and maybe even expected by todays standards but it does show the loss of war. The fear of war and the heroism that was a part of being a marine in WWII. It shows us 3 dimensional characters like "High Pockets" who loves his men as much as he loves the Marines. Yes, I suppose some of the situations are glossed over but that is to be expected when you are trying to tell a story this big in the time alloted. The beginning and middle of the film which focus' on training and shipping over seas to New Zealand is first rate entertainment. The last third where we go into combat with the cast is not as realistic as modern films, but how can it be? It is 1955 when this movie was made and the technology to show how war really looks was not possible then. And even if one may argue that it was, the desire and allowable limits of the day would have precluded that sort of realism anyway. All in all, this is a fair if not excellent portrait of marines going to war.

The title of Raoul Walsh's film would indicate a high level of visual war action, but the action in this film is more like a television soap: Peyton Place Meets Boot Camp. Battle Cry is not a bad film by any means, but a mainstream 50's romance, and because it is Walsh, there are excellent things to be found, as long as you don't expect superior battlefield heroics; Aldo Ray and Van Heflin both turn in finely-tuned performances, Ray as a macho player evolving into a loving husband, Van Heflin as a commander who fails to maintain distance from his charges; a young Tab Hunter caught on with teens when he was cast as heartthrob Danny Forrester, and acquits himself nicely.

Three years later, Stanley Kubrick would make the stunning Paths of Glory, a WWI film that revealed the true brutality of battle, and Spielberg would change mainstream war films for all time with Saving Private Ryan; Battle Cry involves the willing viewer in an intelligent adaptation of a best-selling novel and as such, succeeds.