THE movie “Bataan” is a skillful condensation of the original battle of Bataan Peninsula. It is Hollywood’s best war film to date and, as a movie, an experience worthy of the battle itself. The film manages to capture the values of the original: the artfulness of the American-Filipino forces, who were so overpoweringly outnumbered; and their heroism which thwarted the whole weight of the Japanese Empire on a pinpoint of land, causing this empire to pour more and more men into the tiny area—to win it finally but only after hideous slaughter. What the movie does is to reproduce on a small scale the action of intensified warfare. This is done by concentrating on a makeshift American patrol covering the final retreat from the Peninsula, its duty being to blow up one bridge as fast as the enemy rebuilds it. Small, isolated groups like this one (it was composed of twelve soldiers and one sailor), hopelessly unprepared, with only their own pack animals for food, bedeviled by malaria, actually held off the enemy for many months instead of the expected few weeks.
The situations the film uses to present these thirteen expendables have a pulp-story insufficiency. Probably its most antiquated war sequence is that in which the wounded aviator uses his dynamite-laden plane to crash into the bridge. But George Murphy’s enactment of this, in which there are no heroics but only a man gruesomely ill and in pain, supremely disgusted with the pain and the world that caused it, makes this sequence anything but silly. And the whole preparation for this flight, which is so marvelously played and cut, gives it a humanity far from the cliché it could have been. The corny conflict of the two old enemies, Robert Taylor and Lloyd Nolan, reunited on the battlefield, is made digestible by the admission that a man—Nolan—can hate most things and most people and still not apologize. Hollywood romanticism gets out of hand ultimately, in the last half-hour, with Pickett’s charges of Japanese and the inevitable dying off of the patrol, which leaves Sgt. Bill Dane (Taylor) alone, pouring bullets into the oncoming enemy while standing in a grave marked with his own cross. But the success of the movie has already been established, and for keeps. Inside the grotesque pockets of the plot is an emotional honesty got by Tay Garnett’s direction and the good human quality of the playing.
Technically, “Bataan” is that rare American movie which watches an event patiently from moment to moment and from all sides. Of a tree-climbing episode the vital part is the craftsmanship of the climbing and an onlooking soldier’s wonder at it, making the result what it should be—the climax of an action. The psychology of the director is best evidenced by his care in showing the route through the jungle that Taylor and Nolan must take to blow up their bridge, so that when they come back, under attack, the audience knows every painful turn of the course and suffers with them. The accidents are brought off with the greatest sharpness—the death of the Negro, Wendell Epps (Kenneth Spencer), will throw you out of your seat, and the moments of waiting are made interminable—the one in which the men nervously hold their gunfire until the moment arrives to cover the take-off of the airplane is an intensity of acting and cutting. Major credit is due Robert Andrews for his script, which he wrote with the camera rather than the pencil in mind, and for his dialogue, which is meaningful, original and good throughout.
For the most part the players project a definite integrity into their roles; the faults are all minor—the cornet-playing sailor is a caricature, and like the hep-cat Mexican, is embarrassing. The new Negro player, Kenneth Spencer, creates a figure of soft nobility and a great deal of presence. Lloyd Nolan, who has been knocking around B pictures for years (because by Hollywood’s standards he is not handsome enough for hero parts and not ugly enough for character roles), gets back with a vengeance. He twiddles his thumbs distractedly, pantomimes impatience, disgust and obscenities, and produces a trombonish Brooklynese for the ugly surliness of his romantic Mister Boins. Robert Taylor offsets his collar-ad handsomeness with poise and sincerity.
“Bataan” is a picture I like, and recommend as intelligent, where human emotions were, for once, considered appropriate material for the screen.
June 21, 1943