Although I had already decided to write about the above film, I nearly changed my mind after viewing "The Dance of Reality" (2013), the first film from the now 86-year old cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky since 1989's wow-fest "Santa Sangre". Actually I tell a lie since he made "The Rainbow Thief" with Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, et.al. in 1990, but very few people have ever managed to actually view that movie, including yours truly. His latest film which premiered at Cannes is a fanciful account of his childhood in Chile, with his son Brontis playing Jodorowsky's own father, a rabid communist tyrant. The movie is as colourful, weird, and off-the-wall as his earlier flicks and worth searching out if you're a fan.
Back to the business at hand, I actually reviewed the John Ford remake of this movie a while ago: http://pppatty.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/what-price-glory-l952.html. While an enjoyable romp, the old Maxwell Anderson drama is largely played for laughs by James Cagney and Dan Dailey in the classic roles of Flagg and Quirt. The silent movie made two years after the hit Broadway show has its comic moments, but is more of an anti-war statement. Fox made the film as their answer to MGM's "The Big Parade" and it is every bit as good; if anything the battles montage are even more horrific as they brilliantly portray the brutality of war. As Victor McLaglen's Flagg says (in subtitles) 'There must be something wrong with the world if every 30 years it has to be washed in the blood of youngsters'.
Quirt is played by Edmund Lowe, a popular lead of the day, whose subsequent career through 1960 produced very few classics. McLaglen on the contrary became a stalwart member of the Ford repertory company and his boisterous, Irish shenanigans grace a number of that director's great films. Quirt and Flagg are proud marines who have served together in China and the Philippines but who meet up again in a small French village during World War I. Flagg is now a captain to Quirt's top sergeant, but the joshing love-hate relationship they have established over the years is tested to the limits when they both make a play for the landlord's daughter Charmaine, an early role for Mexican beauty Dolores Del Rio. The still-popular song "Charmaine" was especially commissioned for this movie and reprised in the later one. The film and its characters were so popular that McLaglen and Lowe appeared together again in 1929's "The Cock-Eyed World" -- thought to be the first movie sequel -- and subsequently in "Women of All Nations" (1931) and "Hot Pepper" (1933). Again, perhaps, this buddy flick is one of the first 'bromances'.
Directed by Raoul Walsh who had been helming movies since 1913 and whose career continued into the 1960s to include such classics as "The Roaring Twenties" and "White Heat", Walsh embraces Anderson's pacifist message through the action and subtitles softening the horrors with a leavening of good humour and comradeship. Eying the new recruits, Flagg instructs Quirt to train 'these eggs until they are hard-boiled'. He asks them what work they did at home before joining up and we see the cross-section of youth to be sacrificed, from artist to farmer. Particular attention is paid to a young, homesick 'mother's boy'' who has received a letter from home reading that he must be so proud to serve his country. Naturally he is among the first to die, exposing the recruits' vain dreams of glory. Yet even knowing that 'glory' is a big lie, Flagg and Quirt remain loyal marines, ever ready to respond to the bugle's call.
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Advance notice: There will be no blog next Friday since by then I shall be well into the London Film Festival with nine tickets pre-booked. My next entries will detail my viewing adventures in full....
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