“The Purple Heart” is a very efficient Hollywood production, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and purportedly written by him under the pen-name of Melville Crossman, which shows the trial by the Japanese of the eight American fliers who were captured in China after they had taken part in the bombing raid on Tokyo. The fliers are tried—in violation of international law—for murder because they are accused of having bombed non-military objectives. The real aim in trying them seems to have been to get them to disclose where and from what they took off on their mission. After the fliers have been horribly tortured and still refuse to tell the Japs, they are executed. “The Purple Heart” has a bill of goods to sell, concerning the cruelty and inhumanity of the Japanese as opposed to the humanity of Americans, which it sells very crisply and effectively. But I dislike it thoroughly.
There are ways and ways of presenting the enemy’s bestiality; the way of this movie—especially with its provocative use of a trial of war prisoners as a bloodthirsty hint to those courts which, after the war, will try war criminals—seems to me to be the most inhuman, dangerous and short-sighted way. “The Purple Heart” is not interested in making you understand or in enlightening you about the Japanese character, nor in any facts that would account for such cruelty. Rather it has to offer an endless number of similar, one-dimensionally-examined examples of Japanese brutality, the effect of which is to narrow and solidify hatred of a group of people into hatred of a whole people. Besides treating an enormously complicated subject—the Japanese personality—which has a whole complexity of causal factors that “The Purple Heart” doesn’t make the slightest effort to uncover, it treats an enormously delicate subject, which can have the severest, most tragic repercussions, with the care and foresight of a mad bull. I don’t see a great deal of difference between the Japanese court that this movie shows and whose injustice it hates, and its own creative attitude: the movie says that the court was thoroughly biased against the fliers, while the movie’s own attitude toward its every fact is completely biased; the Japanese court in this film is accused of every sort of perjury and malevolence, yet this same film sets itself up as the historical image of an event whose every detail it fashions to its own bias; it is horrified at the inhumanity of the Japanese, yet its own attitude toward them is without human feeling. Whether or not what this film shows is true, it is still, because of its narrowness and restrictiveness, to me an irresponsible picture.
“The Purple Heart,” which stars as its fliers Dana Andrews, Sam Levene and Farley Granger among others, is directed by Lewis Milestone with his usual crispness and conviction, but with a more flexible turn than he showed in either “The North Star” or “Edge of Darkness,” where every happening seemed a stylized, metallic proposition of an original event. There is somewhat more naturalness and give here: in the volatile energy of the fliers’ responses at the trial, in Greenbaum’s self-mockery, and in the imaginative and delicate rendition of youthful love that occurs in a flashback over a water-pail. There is more screen invention and quality in the way events are shown (that of the bailing out of the fliers), in the way they are introduced, and joined. I still think “The Purple Heart” is too much a device solely for allotting models to Americans for bravery and medals to the Japanese for deceit without finding out enough of the characters of the men underneath the medals.
It is a minor point—but worth bringing up after so many repetitions in war movies—that some football-players don’t make All-American, and if they do, aren’t necessarily characterized by that fact, nor are they always so large-sized and of middle-European parentage; some Jews do not come from New York, nor need they always be of the half comic, half wise-guy street-car conductor-type; while we’re on it, why can’t the Jew for once be the villain, or the pilot and leader of the airplane crew; the “Red River Valley,” wonderful as it is, can’t be made to fit all visual images. The Brooklyn Dodgers aren’t used again in this film, but what has been said above applies to them (there are some people who go for the Giants).
As far as I know, the best of the recently released films are “The Curse of the Cat People,” “The Adventures of Mark Twain” and the government release, “With the Marines at Tarawa.”
The address of Blue Note Records, mentioned in “New Orleans Survival,” February 21, is 10 West 47th Street, New York City.
March 27, 1944