“Objective Burma” is a straight-faced account of a raid by American paratroopers on a Japanese radar station in Burma and of their attempt to walk through enemy-filled jungle after a plan to get them out by plane fails. It is as earnest as Hollywood has been in its attempt to show war and soldiers exactly as they are. The actors still look more like movie people than they should, but they look very soldierly when the camera isn’t right on top of them, and when they aren’t made to perform to it as though it were a theatre audience. They run and walk like soldiers and the actors who are seen loitering in the background make the backgrounds seem like those of newsreels. Killing the enemy is still given the significance of cutting down clay pigeons at a rifle gallery, and though half the Americans are killed, their deaths are made as little real in movie terms as possible. The acting by Henry Hull, Errol Flynn, George Tobias and others isn’t wonderful, but it never tried harder to be naturalistic.
“Objective Burma” has been influenced a good deal by documentary ideas so that its record of the paratroopers’ trip takes in more than its melodramatic moments, and it comes closer than usual to telling its story visually. It makes a constant attempt to keep the relationship between people and scene correct and to get as much drama and meaning from this relationship as possible. By the time it’s over you have a fair feeling that the paratroopers did travel some hundreds of miles through the jungle, that it took as long as the people said and that (except for the Japs’ skill at getting themselves killed) what happened probably would have happened on a real-life raid. The movie not only exhibits Hollywood’s usual passion for verisimilitude, but shows some excitement for the look of what it reproduces. There are some wonderful moments, such as a cold, lonely dawn scene during and after the raiders’ parachute jump, and an ornate Burmese village they bump into in mid-afternoon, that capture beautifully the mood of the time of day as well as the extraordinary look of an action, some architecture and the grouping of people who are permeated by the particular mood. The movie gets likably excited over the technique of paratrooping and makes its excitement felt. It is especially good at showing the animal-like ability of the raiders to move through a jungle or to work themselves inside enemy territory.
The director, Raoul Walsh, does very little that is original or of any great force, but he can mimic a number of styles with adequate carpentry. The photography is often emasculated D. W. Griffith; the final night battle owes a great deal to “Desert Victory” and also shows some of the admirable naïveté about thrills that used to be in Westerns. The camera is constantly on the move—to good purpose for long shots of the action, but it seems far too intimate and omnipotent, considering both the disconnected nature of war and its aim, which is to be just like war. Max Steiner’s music for this film is in the traditional manner that reiterates every idea and act with literary noise poorly related to the scene’s visual effect; there are some incredible passages, such as a battle sequence in which every appearance of the enemy is greeted by the drum music used for marching and some head-on collision between the realistic jungle sounds and the musical score doing its interpretation of the jungle. However, there are a few passages when the sound track is dispensed with entirely; at those times the screen seems twice as effective.
The film is admirably objective in its treatment of action and scene, but it is pretty general and soft about its people and has little success in showing the effect of the trip on them. The characters are all the same vague hero. Before a couple of crises somebody turns up with a case of over-emphatic jitters that doesn’t develop into anything, and a rickety war correspondent, acted by Henry Hull with a good editorial manner, is sent along with the raiders but contributes too little to the movie to warrant the great trouble that was taken to put him in it. There isn’t a sign of a relationship developing along the way between any of the men, and when a response to death, pain, impending attack or to a comrade’s character is made, somebody usually explains the response with a big, obvious sentence. Since it gets hardly anywhere into the minds and feelings of its paratroopers, the movie tends to seem a little like a boy-scout hike. But it is an exciting one, and in many ways very genuine.
March 5, 1945