Have you ever wondered why this film feels so cut up? Why the narration feels so out of place? Why there's such self-importance to the titles that the film doesn't share? Well, read Lillian Ross' book Picture about the making of this film to find out! Essentially, Louis B. Mayer hated John Huston, Dore Schary believed in Huston but was unwilling to fight his battles for him (the tragic figure of the book is the film's producer Gottfried Reinhardt who tries desperately to fight Huston's battles in his absence but can't manage it), and Huston bugged out as soon as the going got tough during post-production to make The African Queen. One of the central issues Mayer had with Huston was that Huston was using MGM money to make this grim, arthouse war film without any stars (no, Audie Murphy didn't count, especially not at that point in time), and Huston was off to risk his own money on a star-driven adventure story that was almost guaranteed to make its money back. I really wish Mayer hadn't had the film cut up and we could see the film that William Wyler described as one of the greatest films ever made after an early screening for friends and family, but I completely understand Mayer's concerns. The film test screened poorly (no matter the excuse about the audience), it was well outside the MGM house style (Huston would have probably been more at home at WB during the 30s), and Huston was much more careful with his own money than other people's. That Huston just left the fight over the film he considered his best reflects very poorly on him, to be honest.
Anyway, a youth, Henry (Murphy), is a private in the Union army before a battle in the American Civil War. The regiment has seen no action on the banks of the Rappahannock River, and their lives are little more than drilling constantly while they wait for some kind of order. The waiting has a psychological effect on the men as they constantly wonder how they'll react once the bullets start flying past their heads. Henry's closest friend is Tom (Bill Mauldin) with whom he reacts poorly to Tom's somewhat realistic predictions of how he'll try his best in the upcoming fight, when it eventually comes.
That fight, of course, does come, and Henry flees once the battle gets close. He runs past his commanding officer and into the woods where he gets lost, eventually finding out by eavesdropping that his regiment held the line, and falling in with a line of wounded men.
Now, one of the additions that Mayer demanded of the film to make it more marketable and understandable by audiences is a heavy use of voiceover, largely taken from the source novel by Stephen Crane (the stuff that opens the film about how important the book is definitely doesn't come from Crane himself), and it ends up feeling redundant. Huston was a very good actors' director and everything that the voiceover narration describes we can see on Murphy's face and in his performance. It really is a very good performance, especially considering how much of an amateur Murphy was at the whole acting gig at the time, and then we have James Whitmore as the (uncredited) narrator making the events and subtle emotions on screen blindingly obvious.
It was clear that Huston took the job of adapting The Red Badge of Courage to the screen in part because he wanted to translate the story to a different medium, relying on the cinematic medium's strengths to sell the story without needing to rely on the actual language of the novel to do it. It's an effort at adaptation, not translation, and I really get the sense that the narration was really unnecessary. It's not just the performances but Huston's great cinematic eye that tells this story of cowardice and the heroism that boils up in the same coward.
Filming near his ranch in northern California, Huston wasn't content to film his first film primarily set outdoors since The Treasure of the Sierre Madre in ways that highlighted fuzzy trees in the back of shots of faces. He used his camera to capture a plethora of incredible compositions that take heavy advantage of the foliage, hills, and waters of the land to help tell the story. It's really great to look at and often feels like an artist composing an image rather than a studio director doing a job. That use of composition, from highlighting the smallness of the youth in the face of battle, does more to tell the story of Henry's character cinematically than the voiceover work.
And that the film works as well as it does in this butchered form is really quite remarkable. It's not a masterpiece. If it was at one point, it's been marred enough to the point where it simply is not that anymore, but there's so much craft in the film that the editorial mangling could only harm it so much, as long as they kept the basic bones of the story in place. I do know, from reading Ross's book, that they combined a couple of different battles into one in the edit to streamline and make things more obvious, but the overall effect of the youth's journey from coward to manic berserker is still present.
The combination of images, performance, and basic story come together to make something solidly good and interesting, but the mystery of that original cut will always remain. No one seems to have preserved a copy and, much like Orson Welle's original ending to The Magnificent Ambersons, it's probably lost to time. I'm glad to see the shadow of a potential masterpiece here. It's solidly good, demonstrating some of Huston's greatest technical strengths, but it always does feel like there's a masterpiece hidden just around the corner.
Anyway, a youth, Henry (Murphy), is a private in the Union army before a battle in the American Civil War. The regiment has seen no action on the banks of the Rappahannock River, and their lives are little more than drilling constantly while they wait for some kind of order. The waiting has a psychological effect on the men as they constantly wonder how they'll react once the bullets start flying past their heads. Henry's closest friend is Tom (Bill Mauldin) with whom he reacts poorly to Tom's somewhat realistic predictions of how he'll try his best in the upcoming fight, when it eventually comes.
That fight, of course, does come, and Henry flees once the battle gets close. He runs past his commanding officer and into the woods where he gets lost, eventually finding out by eavesdropping that his regiment held the line, and falling in with a line of wounded men.
Now, one of the additions that Mayer demanded of the film to make it more marketable and understandable by audiences is a heavy use of voiceover, largely taken from the source novel by Stephen Crane (the stuff that opens the film about how important the book is definitely doesn't come from Crane himself), and it ends up feeling redundant. Huston was a very good actors' director and everything that the voiceover narration describes we can see on Murphy's face and in his performance. It really is a very good performance, especially considering how much of an amateur Murphy was at the whole acting gig at the time, and then we have James Whitmore as the (uncredited) narrator making the events and subtle emotions on screen blindingly obvious.
It was clear that Huston took the job of adapting The Red Badge of Courage to the screen in part because he wanted to translate the story to a different medium, relying on the cinematic medium's strengths to sell the story without needing to rely on the actual language of the novel to do it. It's an effort at adaptation, not translation, and I really get the sense that the narration was really unnecessary. It's not just the performances but Huston's great cinematic eye that tells this story of cowardice and the heroism that boils up in the same coward.
Filming near his ranch in northern California, Huston wasn't content to film his first film primarily set outdoors since The Treasure of the Sierre Madre in ways that highlighted fuzzy trees in the back of shots of faces. He used his camera to capture a plethora of incredible compositions that take heavy advantage of the foliage, hills, and waters of the land to help tell the story. It's really great to look at and often feels like an artist composing an image rather than a studio director doing a job. That use of composition, from highlighting the smallness of the youth in the face of battle, does more to tell the story of Henry's character cinematically than the voiceover work.
And that the film works as well as it does in this butchered form is really quite remarkable. It's not a masterpiece. If it was at one point, it's been marred enough to the point where it simply is not that anymore, but there's so much craft in the film that the editorial mangling could only harm it so much, as long as they kept the basic bones of the story in place. I do know, from reading Ross's book, that they combined a couple of different battles into one in the edit to streamline and make things more obvious, but the overall effect of the youth's journey from coward to manic berserker is still present.
The combination of images, performance, and basic story come together to make something solidly good and interesting, but the mystery of that original cut will always remain. No one seems to have preserved a copy and, much like Orson Welle's original ending to The Magnificent Ambersons, it's probably lost to time. I'm glad to see the shadow of a potential masterpiece here. It's solidly good, demonstrating some of Huston's greatest technical strengths, but it always does feel like there's a masterpiece hidden just around the corner.