1949 Poster - Director Allan Dwan
This was the first movie in this series of 50 to disappoint, if only slightly. I wonder if it would have been better in colour; or, if I was an American, I would have subscribed to it more fully. As usual, it seems, the film pays a tribute at the start: To the U.S. Marine Corps, whose exploits and valour have left a lasting impression on the world and in the hearts of their countrymen. No one doubts their valour for a minute, but the the mixing of close-ups with long-shots in the two battle scenes didn't quite work for me. Perhaps it was because all the marines looked roughly the same once they had their helmets on; but I thought most of the characters were relatively superficial, almost caricatures - the wise-cracker, the extremely youthful one, the sentimentalist, the morbid character.
Of course, towering above most of them was Sergeant John M. Stryker (John Wayne); in one shot of the Marines moving, his face was superimposed above them. One Marine says Striker knows his business; but the response is classic, So did Jack the Ripper.
Sergeant Stryker (John Wayne) with his men
Stryker is an extra hard product from a hard school; thus he is clearly the right man to get the Marines thoroughly prepared for what lay ahead. After Guadalcanal, a stop in New Zealand, and the intense training, they are about ready. Stryker does have his demons (his wife has left him and he desperately wants a letter from his ten year-old son), which he tries to purge by regularly getting drunk. He does have a heart, beneath that Wayne-inspired character: on leave, he helps a single mother, giving her money for her baby. His initial relationship with some of the men is poor: despised by 'Pete' Conway (John Agar), a college-education son of Colonel Sam Conway, a man whom Stryker admired; and blamed by Al Thomas (Forrest Tucker), for a previous demotion. However, both men end up admiring him.
These, rather basic, storylines have to jostle with two assaults on Japanese islands - Tarawa and Iwo Jima. The battle landings (spliced with real war footage) are, I suppose inevitably, very similar to watch. Ships pounding the shores; aircraft bombing; various pyrotechnics; landing craft full of men with determined and/or frightened faces; the scramble ashore; men being killed; close-ups of mates hiding together in 'fox holes'; and so on. One problem is that you know Wayne did not actually fight in the real War - but at least his character dies at the moment of success. On his body is an unfinished letter he was writing to his son.
There very little room for any humour. Wayne showing a marine how to bayonet fight, through dancing to a tune; the flirtations at a dance. The two moments I recall are actually 'black' humour: a marine, mortally wounded, has time to say to the camera I will get a good night's sleep tonight; and Wayne himself, just before being shot, remarking that he'd never felt better.
So, not a dud, but not a gripping film either.
The 2011 DVD
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