At first viewing, this is some dated stuff. A black soldier in the Pacific (Edwards) becomes part of a team sent to a dangerous Japanese-held island to map it before an invasion. The team is led by an inexperienced young major (Dick) and includes as old high-school chum of Woods' (Bridges), a tough and seasoned sergeant (Lovejoy) and a rich ex executive (Brodie) now reduced to schlepping around an M-1 and making racist cracks in front of Woods, sometimes directly AIMED at Woods.
The majority of screen time is given over to these five guys who accomplish their mission, but not without a lot of melodramatic arguing and the loss of Bridges and the severe wounding of Lovejoy. Woods finds that when he's ordered to leave his friend's mangled body behind, he can't walk. They barely make it to the boat waiting for them offshore.
The main narrative thread has an Army doctor (Corey) treating Woods with narcolepsy in the hospital. No combat soldiers in World War II received much in the way of longer treatment. Shooting a patient up with barbiturates was seen as a quick way of getting him over his "combat fatigue" or "shell shock" as it was called in the previous war. Patients with hysterical disorders like Woods' were sometimes treated by other personnel with contempt. Now there isn't much in the way of hysterical paralysis, but PTSD takes the form of depression, nightmares, and suicidal tendencies, and it's recognized for the serious disorder that it is. Here, the viewer must sit through the stereotypical scene parodied so exquisitely in "Doctor Strangelove" -- "Mein Fuhrer! I can VALK!" Yet, dated though it is, and inexpensively made, and careless in its wardrobe and makeup, and sometimes formulaic in its characterization, it's not a stupid movie. It has a nifty little verse by the minor poet from Brooklyn, Eve Merriam, for one thing.
Woods is an African-American soldier stuck with four white guys in a dangerous environment, but he's by no means saintly. He's no braver than anyone else. He perspires like the Fontana Trevi. He's over-sensitive to the color of his skin, angry and ashamed at the same time. And as the psychiatrist establishes, the problem resides in Woods now, as much as in his comrades in arms, although the ultimate responsibility is the racist society in which he grew up.
Race is the Great Divide in this country, a San Andreas fault that extends for a thousand miles buried underground and seldom referred to. It's been that way for hundreds of years. A French observer, Alexis de Toqueville, noted it in free states in the North in 1835. "Thus, the Negro is free but is able to share neither the rights, pleasures, work, pains, nor even the grave with the man to whom he has been declared equal ".
The psychiatrist (and the writers) were right, despite all their blather and cajoling. Racists in America have a severe problem, but Woods has absorbed that division and now he has a problem as well. Blacks have become solidarity, as will any minority that has been oppressed for generations, and many are loathe to give that loyalty up. I've taught at a predominantly black (ie., voluntarily segregated) university in the South for years and authored a book with an African-American colleague. My mother's best friend at work was black. And the one thing that was never seriously discussed was race. Like the San Andreas fault, it's still there, just as it was when this movie was made in 1949, but it's buried now, even as the pressure between the two geographic plates remains.
I kind of approve of movies that don't separate their characters into Manichean pigeon holes of "good" and "evil" (or black and white). This movie gets the job done by turning everyone into a human being.
The majority of screen time is given over to these five guys who accomplish their mission, but not without a lot of melodramatic arguing and the loss of Bridges and the severe wounding of Lovejoy. Woods finds that when he's ordered to leave his friend's mangled body behind, he can't walk. They barely make it to the boat waiting for them offshore.
The main narrative thread has an Army doctor (Corey) treating Woods with narcolepsy in the hospital. No combat soldiers in World War II received much in the way of longer treatment. Shooting a patient up with barbiturates was seen as a quick way of getting him over his "combat fatigue" or "shell shock" as it was called in the previous war. Patients with hysterical disorders like Woods' were sometimes treated by other personnel with contempt. Now there isn't much in the way of hysterical paralysis, but PTSD takes the form of depression, nightmares, and suicidal tendencies, and it's recognized for the serious disorder that it is. Here, the viewer must sit through the stereotypical scene parodied so exquisitely in "Doctor Strangelove" -- "Mein Fuhrer! I can VALK!" Yet, dated though it is, and inexpensively made, and careless in its wardrobe and makeup, and sometimes formulaic in its characterization, it's not a stupid movie. It has a nifty little verse by the minor poet from Brooklyn, Eve Merriam, for one thing.
Woods is an African-American soldier stuck with four white guys in a dangerous environment, but he's by no means saintly. He's no braver than anyone else. He perspires like the Fontana Trevi. He's over-sensitive to the color of his skin, angry and ashamed at the same time. And as the psychiatrist establishes, the problem resides in Woods now, as much as in his comrades in arms, although the ultimate responsibility is the racist society in which he grew up.
Race is the Great Divide in this country, a San Andreas fault that extends for a thousand miles buried underground and seldom referred to. It's been that way for hundreds of years. A French observer, Alexis de Toqueville, noted it in free states in the North in 1835. "Thus, the Negro is free but is able to share neither the rights, pleasures, work, pains, nor even the grave with the man to whom he has been declared equal ".
The psychiatrist (and the writers) were right, despite all their blather and cajoling. Racists in America have a severe problem, but Woods has absorbed that division and now he has a problem as well. Blacks have become solidarity, as will any minority that has been oppressed for generations, and many are loathe to give that loyalty up. I've taught at a predominantly black (ie., voluntarily segregated) university in the South for years and authored a book with an African-American colleague. My mother's best friend at work was black. And the one thing that was never seriously discussed was race. Like the San Andreas fault, it's still there, just as it was when this movie was made in 1949, but it's buried now, even as the pressure between the two geographic plates remains.
I kind of approve of movies that don't separate their characters into Manichean pigeon holes of "good" and "evil" (or black and white). This movie gets the job done by turning everyone into a human being.