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Reviews
Fury in the Pacific (1945)
U.S. Marines and Army Infantry seaborne forces, backed by Air Force fighters, pursue campaign to drive Japanese out of Pacific island chains
A grappling battlefield filming in B&W of the bloody assault on the Pacific island of Peleliu (nowadays, Palau) by forces of the 1st Marine Division and the 81st Army Infantry Division,aimed at the seizure of a small airstrip deemed vital to General Douglas MacArthur's progress towards the retaking of the Philippines. Bearing in mind that the Japanese garrison was practically wiped out (10,695 dead and only 202 survivors captured) and that the American side (with a total of 22 thousand fighting men committed) suffered 1,794 killed and 8,010 wounded, it was the battle with the highest casualty rate of all those held in the Pacific Theater.Expected to last only four days, it dragged on from September to November 1944,the fighting going on in 115ºF. heat and the only American drinking water supply drenched in oil.The film's stark images, filmed on the front line throughout, show Japanese forces being forced by napalm dousing out of caves and dugouts, and shot down as they emerged; and the bodies being washed ashore of the Marines and soldiers who were cut down upon stepping out of the landing craft, stopped short in the water from being able to wade their way ashore -these images conveying the same gruesome impact as those in the 1944 John Ford documentary "With the Marines at Tarawa"-. Deftly narrated by Hollywood's sometimes leading man, sometimes character actor Richard Carlson (who made his fame in such films as the 1941 flick "The little foxes",the 1950 drama/adventure "King Solomon's Mines" -alongside Clark Gable,Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly-, and the horror/science fiction movies "Creature from the Black Lagoon" and "It came from Outer Space"), this documentary pays deserving tribute to the persevering contribution of the individual fighting man to the winning of the war against Japanese expansionism in the Far East -which indeed raged unstoppable between 1931 and 1944-. Another lesson that liberty is never obtained gratis, it has to be conquered through confrontation and sacrifice.
Sniper (1993)
U.S. military marksmen at deadly loggerheads in jungle mission
Best acting rendered by Tom Berenger.Billy Zane,otherwise commendable for dramatic adventure performances in Memphis Belle (1993) and The Phantom (1996),fails to make believable his character's see-sawing,erratic personality (how has he been chosen as a National Security Council operative for a top-ranking killing mission in the Panamanian outback, with only an office background?).The build-up is interesting enough,though the junior marksman played by Zane is deeply fear-stricken to begin with and later on at best irresponsibly indecisive while unbelievably careless,grouchy and childishly arrogant in his goings-on in the jungle,with the murderous streak suddenly developed against his senior partner toward the end of the story seeming very far-fetched,in view of the fact that the baddies are a mere stone's throw away and closing in,so you would not think anyone in that situation would care to consider erasing the only person on his side,not at least until after they had succeeded in escaping and certainly not in the middle of the bullet-ridden mêlée.Berenger looks and acts the part he plays,as a professional military man with all the trappings of a skilled specialist,bare of conceit,plus a moral streak(in jumping to the occasion of wiping out two evildoers rather than just one).The film's unsurprising ending -the junior marksman growing up to become a man- can be discounted by the audience: nothing to remain in the viewer's memory -certainly nothing as Sgt. Croft's unexpected demise towards the end of Raoul Walsh's 1958 film "The Naked and the Dead"-.