I found this riveting study in battlefield psychology interesting on several levels. It hews closely to the novel. Indeed, the narrator claims this at the beginning of the movie. Maybe Huston wanted the studio brass to take note that they were dealing with a classic which many in the audience would have read. No movie, before or since, reproduces the language of the Civil War era as faithfully as this one. (Ken Burns's great documentary, of course, contains direct quotations from letter and diaries, and is thus, perhaps, the single best cinematic work on the Civil War, but as a cinematic drama of the Civil War, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE is unmatched.) The way this movie is shot makes me think of movies made twenty years later. It is indeed black and white, but in the hand-held look of it, it has more in common, visually, with, say, WISE BLOOD than TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE. It's not merely that the camera roves, it is that the sun is allowed to shine into the lens often and that the close-ups seem to be timed to highlight the vulnerability of the characters. It does not look as if Huston is surprising his actors (a la Kazan), but he has gotten them to relax, somehow. This a naturalistic movie. Hollywood wasn't making naturalistic movies in 1951. But John Huston, of course, trumps Hollywood. The studio hacked up the movie while Huston was in Africa filming THE African QUEEN. But enough of Huston's stamp remains. (Somewhere on the message board for the present site, Huston is quoted, many years after the movie, saying that the cuts were not as drastic as film-buffs think.) THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, like many of Huston's movies, manages to convey the tone of the novel on which it is based. (THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE DEAD, THE African QUEEN and THE MALTESE FALCON are among the greatest movies of all time, and Huston based each one on a book or a short story.) Maybe the cut footage will show up in somebody's vault and be released some day. But, for now, we have a taut, powerful war movie, evocative of the era on which it is based, faithful to its source, and displaying a sensibility which wouldn't come into vogue until two decades later.
Review of The Red Badge of Courage
