“Pride of the Marines” is a tough-minded, intense, skillful movie about the Marine hero Al Schmid (John Garfield), who was blinded in combat on Guadalcanal after he and two other Marines had killed two hundred Japanese. It begins with the year before Pearl Harbor, during which Schmid falls in love and gets engaged, in traditional movie style, shows the battle on Guadalcanal, Schmid’s hospitalization in San Diego, and the first days of his return home to Philadelphia. The film is most deeply concerned with showing the good adjustment made by a soldier to a severe war injury, and also with presenting some of the hope and fear with which soldiers look toward their coming civilian life. The events are prolonged to an unusual length, each moment is made to contain a forceful action or statement, and the tone of the event is continually returned to a bitter, ruinous, savage or sour note. In the process a lot that is important and bold is shown or said and a variety of credible action, feeling and idea is packed into each event. A good example of this is a conversation between the hero and his friend on the train going home. Mainly it is good because for once there is a believable feeling of people on a train—the light is garish enough, the atmosphere is warm and sticky and the talk an unending, variegated, exhibitionistic kind in which you feel each person is trying to entertain the other. It is also excellent because it works doggedly through an argument filled with disturbing elements. One of these has to do with the hero’s being asked if he would go through the war again if he knew he would be blinded: the movie is honest enough to show him perplexed and unable to answer. Another is an angry description by the hero’s friend (Dane Clark) of his trouble in getting work in this country because he is Jewish.
The film is definitely above the current average in every department except that of background music. Movie music could not be written less imaginatively than it was for this one: for instance, there is the scene in which a soldier delivers an unbelievably corny, inflated eulogy of America while the invisible orchestra plays “America.” The picture’s failings and virtues are strikingly present in the Guadalcanal battle episode, in which three Marines, operating one machine gun from a fairly exposed position, kill what seems like the entire Japanese army. Some of its virtues are that the Marines are given battle emotions that seem entirely credible; their excessively sharpened, frightened, almost panicky reactions and shouting give you a constant, terrifying feeling of how close to death they know themselves; at the beginning they check their gun and ammunition and make their preparations in a very realistic manner; throughout the action they deal with the gun and worry about it in a workmanlike way; and the scene seems to take as much time on the screen as it would in reality. Some of the failures are that the photography in the studio-made scenes (the movie uses shots taken during the actual battle) is an unconvincing, ineffectual, soft kind in which the main high light is inevitably out of place on the hero’s helmet or forehead; though Garfield’s acting of a very young, frightened, almost hysterical soldier seemed exactly right, the acting of the other two has a make-believe quality; the terrain seems both fantastic and cooked up; and there is always a feeling that the scene is being made to contain more excitement and tension than it should.
There is often a good attempt to project feeling and story solely through an imaginative use of the camera, and unlike the usual attempts in this direction, the effort doesn’t seem eclectic, mechanical or fantastically heavy. In the visualizing of Garfield’s nightmare about being blind, the first part seemed to me completely convincing and with an odd, wistful quality in the way it showed some of the hero’s more anxious moments in battle by combining negative and positive film—the rest of it struck me as being too realistic and banal in symbolism. Another inventive scene is an excellent, tense one in which Garfield’s eyes are examined after an operation: it consists in part of an obvious use of blank screen that produces a sharp, correct effect. The script writing of Albert Maltz, which seemed to me the most creditable contribution to the film, has some subtle, very emotional incidents of a kind that is rare in movies—like that of the hero’s suddenly going off into an unspoken, sad, loving rumination about his girl. John Garfield, when he is trying to be anything but hard and defensive and is allowed to talk a little less and at a speed slower than his usual imitation of a drill press, becomes surprisingly boyish, somewhat woebegone, nice-spirited and more valuable as an actor than I have ever seen him be.
September 24, 1945