The Red Badge of Courage (1951)

Some movies are so familiar, and yet so fresh when seen again years later. I had the pleasure of watching this old John Huston classic today, on Memorial Day, and I'm glad I did. The Red Badge of Courage is one example of Hollywood doing a quintessential American novel justice on the big screen.

Real-life war hero Audie Murphy (the most decorated combat soldier in U.S. history) stars as young Henry Fleming, "the youth" who yearns to prove himself in battle -- to become a man, in his own eyes and in those of his comrades. He serves alongside a battle-hardened unit of distinctive characters -- the tall soldier, the tattered man, the lieutenant, and others -- none of whom have names, yet each of whom is made vivid by this towering cast. In particular, veteran character actors Royal Dano, Arthur Hunnicutt, Bill Mauldin, and John Dierkes all breathe life into their portrayals of Union soldiers facing the smoke, carnage, and confusion of the Civil War.

And Murphy just shines as the youth. An amateur with no acting experience when James Cagney was struck by his Life magazine cover (celebrating his truly amazing feats of sheer courage in the European theater), Murphy became a fine actor in his own right. But this is his signature performance, one Murphy invests with a raw emotion and fumbling bravado that makes the youth easy to recognize and utterly sympathetic as he vaults from cowardice to courage in the course of a day. Murphy's young soldier is at once familiar and yet extraordinary. It's such a definitive performance that it's hard to imagine anyone else taking the role (even though Richard Thomas did a fine job with it in a 1974 TV movie version), and it's hard to understand why Murphy received no nominations for nailing this role.

But one of the biggest roles in Huston's telling of Crane's story is you, the viewer, thanks to Harold Rosson's stunning cinematography. Cameras take the part of individual soldiers, elbowing into groups to hear the latest news from the front, or joining the charge against a dug-in Confederate front. Faces emerge from the smoke, then vanish, or fall with a harsh, final plummet. In one heart-rending scene, a delirious tall soldier (Dano) wanders from the retreating column of wounded soldiers to chase a hallucination, all the way to his last breath.

My only big complaint with Huston's film isn't Huston's fault. At a mere 69 minutes, the film moves a little too quickly to let the moral gravity of Crane's great story really settle in. That was famously MGM's work, trimming what was a two-hour epic down to under an hour and a quarter while Huston was out of the country, working on another film. Neither Huston nor Murphy could prevail upon MGM to let them buy the rights and release a longer version -- in fact, when Huston asked, the studio advised him that all the extraneous footage had been destroyed. It is to be hoped that missing footage may one day turn up in a closet somewhere; Huston later related how his favorite scene had been cut from the film.

A real shame, that. But what we have left is still one fine war film, a classic every bit deserving of the name.

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