Beach Red (1967) 105m
Actor-Director-Producer and co-Writer Cornel Wilde delivered a war film that pressed the right buttons with critics and audiences during the Vietnam protests of the late 60s. It's perhaps not as well known as other big-budgeted war pictures of the period, but well worth seeing. Wilde plays the Captain of a company of soldiers fighting in the Pacific in WWII, whose two objectives are to establish a beachhead on a Japanese-occupied island and scout inland for information. Wilde's directorial style catches us off guard -- it's the kind of film where we expect random acts to occur to any character at any time, yet we are kept from feeling on edge by his use of pleasant, relaxing images and sounds. The jungle should be threatening and poisonous but instead is beautiful and natural; the soldiers aren't grimy and battle-worn but tanned and orderly.
Wilde isn't interested in shocking us (as SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and its many immediate imitators would do many years later) or lecturing us. It would have been easy in one scene, when soldiers are staring at one of their fallen comrades, to have characters editorialize or comment broadly on the futility of fighting just to drum into us the waste of it all. Instead of eulogizing they stand silently, left to their own thoughts (which we overhear). This, and other forms of understatement (e.g. subliminal flashes of sights and sounds) are used throughout BEACH RED effectively. Despite all the action and violence it's the peaceful moments that linger. The point the film appears to be making is that at its core war is an abominable and unnecessary interruption every human being's right to lead a peaceful existence. Many of the characters have flashbacks of their domestic lives before the fighting, when things were normal and a lot happier. They're initially just as cliched as every other flashback we've seen in war movies, but Wilde chooses to show them from both points of view -- the US troops and the Japanese -- and presents them as still photographs and sound grabs, intercutting them at intervals to show that they are flashes of thoughts passing through the soldiers minds at all times, whether they are living or dying.
The sheer mindless of the fighting is ably portrayed by the elemental drive of the story in which the soldiers are presented as insects, doing nothing but moving forward, deeper and deeper into conflict. They swarm en masse across sand and dirt and grass for the first part of the film, crawling and crouching (the camera is kept at ground level) until they are able to move upright, at which point a narrator tells us that all the hostile insects in the jungle ahead are Japanese. Dwarfed by the natural environment of the island, these soldiers may as well be rival ant colonies at war. BEACH RED doesn't treat the enemy as monstrous or sympathetic -- they are simply there. When there is any conflict both sides lose equal numbers, which seems the simplest way to show us that everybody loses. Wilde's project was well-received and still holds up decades later, which is more than can be said for Actor-Director John Wayne's embarrassing attempt to redress the balance with his pro-Vietnam film THE GREEN BERETS the following year. In Wayne's vision, GREEN meant Go! For Wilde, RED meant Stop!
sburridge@hotmail.com
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