Some of the photographers involved in this pep piece must have put their necks on the line. They were embedded with the First Marines and some of the detonations are pretty close. None of it is stock footage. It's all original, shot for this documentary.
And it's identifiably Fordian, alternating as it does between gruff understatement, mostly by narrator John Ireland, and plaintive sentimentality by narrator Irving Pichel, whose voice you will recognize from "How Green Was My Valley" and "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." It smacks of Ford, and he evidently put a good deal of effort into it. The time spent was counted as active duty and led to his promotion to Rear Admiral before his retirement.
Yet it's not a poetic piece and it's not strictly educational. What it LOOKS like, with its inexpensive Republic Studios "Truecolor", is somebody's home movies, a mosaic of images put together by editors and "supervised," as the credits have it, by John Ford. One imagines Ford sitting through a rough screening and issuing orders about where to use the Marine Corps Hymn and suggesting the dialog that might be dubbed in when Chesty Puller is speaking on the handy talky.
The crew assembling the film must have known exactly what Ford would want because, if you associate a certain piece of the mosaic with Ford's previous work, you're liable to find it here. The GIs singing "Silent Night" at Christmas. Korean nuns. Military funerals. Mass, geometrically aligned crosses in cemeteries. Shots of wounded men, bleeding or smoking on stretchers.
But it's all a bit confusing because of the way it's assembled. First we see the Marines "coming back", worn out. Then we see them when they "started out." Then we see them in combat. Then we see them coming back again. And without any orientation we have no idea of where they began or where they went.
The narrative is not much help. Ireland's comments are chiefly from the grunts' point of view. "A hard rubble road . . . Fire Number One Gun! . . . Enemy shell, look out! . . . Plenty of thirty-caliber ammunition for the hungry machine guns." Sometimes it's almost embarrassing in its datedness. Of enemy prisoners, "But these mugs are tough. They clammed up and won't sing." Most notably the voice-over narration gives practically no sense of place. "Then the heart-breaking order comes: burn everything and bug out." Burn what? Bug out from where? And, "All night long the Mighty Mo pounded the beach." What beach? Pichel's narration is no more helpful. "Burn out the dug-in Commies . . . Stop the Red scourge." One of "the poor little kids" to whom the Marines give candy and chewing gum is named "Babe Ruth DiMaggio." I don't mean to sound cynical about the goals of the conflict or too caustic about the film itself, which I assume was never meant to be a work of art. God knows, it's too bad the war ended in a virtual stalemate. South Korea has had its dictators, to be sure, but North Korea has become a self-contained and semi-suicidal sump of paranoia.
Ford claimed that he was involved in every aspect of the production and spent numerous hours being catapulted from aircraft carriers, slogging up and down mountains, and all the rest, but Ford was a notorious liar. He seemed to treat BS or, pardon me, blarney as an art to be practiced during interviews. In the case of this film, I suspect he saw it after it was put together and made a few suggestions that might play better with an unsophisticated wartime audience.
And it's identifiably Fordian, alternating as it does between gruff understatement, mostly by narrator John Ireland, and plaintive sentimentality by narrator Irving Pichel, whose voice you will recognize from "How Green Was My Valley" and "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon." It smacks of Ford, and he evidently put a good deal of effort into it. The time spent was counted as active duty and led to his promotion to Rear Admiral before his retirement.
Yet it's not a poetic piece and it's not strictly educational. What it LOOKS like, with its inexpensive Republic Studios "Truecolor", is somebody's home movies, a mosaic of images put together by editors and "supervised," as the credits have it, by John Ford. One imagines Ford sitting through a rough screening and issuing orders about where to use the Marine Corps Hymn and suggesting the dialog that might be dubbed in when Chesty Puller is speaking on the handy talky.
The crew assembling the film must have known exactly what Ford would want because, if you associate a certain piece of the mosaic with Ford's previous work, you're liable to find it here. The GIs singing "Silent Night" at Christmas. Korean nuns. Military funerals. Mass, geometrically aligned crosses in cemeteries. Shots of wounded men, bleeding or smoking on stretchers.
But it's all a bit confusing because of the way it's assembled. First we see the Marines "coming back", worn out. Then we see them when they "started out." Then we see them in combat. Then we see them coming back again. And without any orientation we have no idea of where they began or where they went.
The narrative is not much help. Ireland's comments are chiefly from the grunts' point of view. "A hard rubble road . . . Fire Number One Gun! . . . Enemy shell, look out! . . . Plenty of thirty-caliber ammunition for the hungry machine guns." Sometimes it's almost embarrassing in its datedness. Of enemy prisoners, "But these mugs are tough. They clammed up and won't sing." Most notably the voice-over narration gives practically no sense of place. "Then the heart-breaking order comes: burn everything and bug out." Burn what? Bug out from where? And, "All night long the Mighty Mo pounded the beach." What beach? Pichel's narration is no more helpful. "Burn out the dug-in Commies . . . Stop the Red scourge." One of "the poor little kids" to whom the Marines give candy and chewing gum is named "Babe Ruth DiMaggio." I don't mean to sound cynical about the goals of the conflict or too caustic about the film itself, which I assume was never meant to be a work of art. God knows, it's too bad the war ended in a virtual stalemate. South Korea has had its dictators, to be sure, but North Korea has become a self-contained and semi-suicidal sump of paranoia.
Ford claimed that he was involved in every aspect of the production and spent numerous hours being catapulted from aircraft carriers, slogging up and down mountains, and all the rest, but Ford was a notorious liar. He seemed to treat BS or, pardon me, blarney as an art to be practiced during interviews. In the case of this film, I suspect he saw it after it was put together and made a few suggestions that might play better with an unsophisticated wartime audience.