“I am really a coward. I know I am, so that’s why I did foolish things. I was decorated eight or nine times, trying to prove that I was not a coward, but after it was all over I still knew, know, that I was a coward.”

– John Ford –

June 4, 1942. The Battle of Midway. John Ford was on his back, covered in debris, unconscious. All around him bombs were dropping, buildings were erupting into monstrous fireballs, and young marines were dodging deadly lines of machine-gun strafing sent down by Japanese fighter planes. Ford and his assistant, young Jack MacKenzie Jr. (whose father was an RKO cinematographer) had been perched on the roof of a power station on Eastern Island, brazenly filming the morning attack by the Japanese and reporting enemy plane positions to headquarters, when a bomb landed a scant twenty feet from their position. The shockwave was so great that MacKenzie later recalled he was “bounced flat on my face by the terrific explosion,” adding, “we almost lost Commander Ford.”

The blast had sent a large chunk of concrete slamming into the director, knocking him out cold. When he came to, he also found that metal shrapnel had ripped through his left forearm, leaving behind an ugly three-inch gash. Bleeding and badly shaken, Ford grabbed his camera and with MacKenzie hurried down from the power-station roof. Moments later, they watched the enemy bomb the building into oblivion.

“Film faces!” Ford told MacKenzie before dashing off. For the rest of the morning they staggered about the island, each capturing spectacular images of raging infernos, flying debris, swooping planes, and young soldiers — kids, really — shooting enemy Zeros out of the sky with anti-aircraft guns. Talking of that hard-won film footage later, Ford said, “The image jumps a lot because the grenades were exploding right next to me. Since then, they do that on purpose, shaking the camera when filming war scenes. For me it was authentic because the shells were exploding at my feet.”

At one point, with the Japanese dive-bombing so close to the ground that Ford could clearly see their smiling faces, he watched in astonishment as a group of bold Americans trotted out into the open and proceeded to fulfill their daily morning duty of running up the red, white and blue. Wounded and exhausted, Ford had the presence of mind to race into position, raise his camera on his good arm, and forever capture the stirring moment of our country’s colors rising in a blue sky billowing with black smoke — the events of “The Star-Spangled Banner” brought to majestic life. Upon viewing the footage later, Henry Fonda would reverently call that meager strip of celluloid, “one of the all-time great shots.” In its own way, it rivals the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima several years later — less iconic perhaps, but just as moving. By God, it was “time for the colors to go up,” Ford later marveled, “and despite the bombs and everything, these kids ran up and raised the flag.”

When it was over, twenty men were dead on the islands, but out in the ocean America had won an incredible victory, using guile, strategy, lots of guts, and a bit of luck to overcome a ruthless, numerically superior opponent. John Ford was left standing amidst the carnage, his pockets filled with exposed film cartridges, his body quivering with adrenaline and fear. “Oh, we’d go ahead and do a thing,” he recalled toward the end of his life, “but after it was over, your knees would start shaking.”

When Ford viewed the rushes that he had taken at Midway — the massive explosions, the debris slamming into the camera, the spectacular raising of the flag amongst black clouds of ruin — he knew he had something special. But in a way, the material was too good — sure to be heavily redacted by the Navy as too frightful and disturbing for public consumption. So in Washington soon after the battle, the wily director secretly passed the reels to one of his young Field Photo editors, the former child actor Robert Parrish, and asked him to cut it down to a decent twenty-minute documentary.

“Is it for the public or the OSS?” Parrish asked.

“It’s for the mothers of America,” Ford shot back. “It’s to let them know that we’re in a war, and that we’ve been getting the shit kicked out of us for five months, and now we’re starting to hit back.”

Ford devised an elaborate series of ruses that kept the film one step ahead of the higher-ups. “I don’t want you to work here,” he told Parrish. “As soon as it’s discovered in Honolulu that I’ve smuggled the film past the Navy censors they’ll come snooping around with enough brass to take it away from us. They’ll assign seven or eight high-ranking associate producers and public relations officers to the project. The four services will start bickering over it and the whole thing will get so bogged down in red tape that we’ll never see it again, let alone the mothers of America.” He thus ordered Parrish: “You get on a plane and take the film to Hollywood. Don’t report to anyone. Go to your mother’s house and hide it until you hear from me. . .I’ll tell them that it’s not my fault if an enlisted man steals eight cans of top-secret film and runs home to his mother!”

In Hollywood a few weeks later, safe from the many prying eyes in Washington DC, they edited in secret, preparing an “official” war documentary like no other. Ford eschewed bland reportage, instead going unabashedly for the gut and the heart. To fulfill his vision, he began calling in favors all over town. The great Alfred Newman, musical head of Twentieth-Century Fox (and composer of the now-famous fanfare that, to this day, proceeds every Fox movie), was called in to orchestrate stirring versions of well-loved tunes like “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Anchors Aweigh,” and the Marine and Air Force Hymns. A wistful piece of accordion music from Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath was spliced in at a key moment. Accessible, down-home, folksy movie stars like Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell (who played Tom and Ma Joad, respectively, in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath), along with more erudite and stentorian men like actor Donald Crisp and the director Irving Pichel (who was later blacklisted), were asked to emote heartfelt lines of dialogue written by Ford and his longtime (and very liberal) screenwriting partner, Dudley Nichols:

Men and Women of America — here come your neighbor’s sons!

. . .men who fought to the last round of ammunition, and flew to the last drop of gas, and then crashed into the sea.

Get these boys to the hospital, please do! Quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets, give them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands. . .

Editor Parrish thought such lines sounded hopelessly corny, and told Ford as much. Ford stressed that this wasn’t going to be just another throwaway rah-rah newsreel to be dumped between features at the theater.

“You have a mother, don’t you?” he asked Parrish.

“Of course.”

“Well,” said Ford, “how do you think she’d feel if she saw you in that ambulance.”

Throughout the editing, Ford’s choices were unconventional, oftentimes startling. He dwelt on wistful shots of sailors relaxing in the setting sun during the evening before the battle, and built a humorous Wild Kingdom-like interlude featuring the birds on the island. He spent what some thought was an inordinate amount of time showing the haggard faces of downed pilots rescued after over a week at sea. He lingered on images of the impromptu funerals for men killed in the battle, their flag-draped bodies lined up on the ground. Heck, he even included a quick shot of himself:

This film was turning out to be much more than the usual show-only-the-positive-stuff propaganda piece. It was, in the words of biographer Joseph McBride, “an extraordinarily vivid and eloquent meditation on war, one of the rare pieces of propaganda that is also a timeless work of art.”

Remembering the political battles he suffered through during the early days of Field Photo, Ford made sure that all branches of the armed services were well-represented in The Battle of Midway, going so far as to measure the amount of coverage each received down to the foot. He also staged a screening for President and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Joint Chiefs, and an assemblage of White House aides, hoping their approval might fend off any censors looking to re-edit his film. As the story goes, the President talked distractedly throughout the movie, until suddenly stunned into silence by a heroic close-up. It was his own son — James Roosevelt, who had requested combat duty at the start of the war, and who was assigned with the Marine Raiders on Midway when the battle occurred. Ford had caught a quick shot of the young Major saluting, and before the screening had secretly spliced it into the film to surprise the President. The entire audience fell into a hush for the remaining minutes of the film, and when the lights came up Eleanor Roosevelt had tears in her eyes. “I want every mother in America to see this picture,” President Roosevelt intoned, and soon hundreds of prints were being distributed to theaters across the nation.

Robert Parrish, the editor who had been so worried that Ford’s cornpone dialogue would be laughed out of the theater, later attended the premiere of the documentary at Radio City Music Hall. He watched the audience fall under the film’s spell, quietly absorbing the rousing military anthems, the sensitive pre-battle montage, the electrifying shots of exploding buildings and billowing black clouds, the heroic raising of the flag. Then, as all of this gave way to the shots of the emaciated downed pilots, Jane Darwell’s loving, matronly voice cooed over the sound system:

Get these boys to the hospital. Please do! Quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets, give them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands. Get them to the hospital. Hurry! Please!

Somewhere in the darkness of the theater, a woman choked back an anguished scream. Others began to groan softly as if in physical pain. A cacophony of weeping rose up like a wave and filled the theater. And like a dam bursting, Parrish watched that jaded, seen-it-all New York audience fall apart. It was a primal reaction he would never forget.

“On reflection,” Parrish mused decades later,

there have been so many changes in combat film. It’s so much more realistic now, and it’s not particularly unusual to see people get shot, particularly after Vietnam. But The Battle of Midway was the first film of its kind. It was a stunning, amazing thing to see. At Radio City people screamed, women cried, and the ushers had to take them out. And it was all over the material that we had fought about, the stuff I thought was too maudlin, like when Jane Darwell says, “Get those boys to the hospital, please do! Quickly!” The people, they just went crazy.

It’s indescribably sad to realize that, in our time, many people now laugh at the exact same footage that made those women weep. They watch old movies like The Battle of Midway and they cackle at the narration, groan at the music, and dismiss it all as a hokey and corny reminder of an absurdly innocent and gullible age. They sit in self-satisfied judgment of the rubes of the past, safe and smug in their twenty-first century superiority, drunk on their impregnable sense of entitlement and sophistication.

We forget. Always, we forget. We forget how much mental strain Americans of that time were under. We forget that the first six months of World War II saw America lose battle after battle in the Pacific. Thousands of husbands and sons were killed. A steady stream of 9/11-sized disasters shook the country’s psyche, one after the other, boom, boom, boom. Everyone knew people who died, or were trapped in murderous concentration camps, or were at that very moment risking their lives every day in faraway lands, possibly never to return.

And in the midst of all of that pain and worry and anguish, one man — a self-described coward — had used all of his artistry and courage and guile to create against all odds a twenty-minute paean to those lost husbands and fathers and sons, a message brimming with hope and awash in love and pure patriotism. It was more than a film, it was a gift.

John Ford had been right: those old-fashioned words and sentiments, presented without shame, were just what the mothers of America needed.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: a study of the bestselling 1942 book They Were Expendable, and of the hero whose exploits formed the basis for John Ford’s incomparable film.

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable“:

Part 1

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

John Ford’s The Battle of Midway: I believe it is the solemn duty of every conservative to see this at least once in their life, and by “see” I mean really see, not just blithely skitter through with one eye while the other drifts through their incoming email.

There are a number of versions available on the web, but all are exceedingly poor quality — with one exception. Recently, The Documentary Channel posted a gorgeous restored version of the film on YouTube, allowing us to see and hear The Battle of Midway for the first time in all of its original glory:

It’s less than twenty minutes long, so do yourself a favor: close the shades, throw out the cat, take the phone off the hook, and watch this with your full attention. Think about how someone in 1942 must have felt while viewing it with a packed audience in a darkened theater, all of them having suffered through six months of defeat and loss, and none knowing what the perilous future would bring. Allow those days to come back to life for you here in 2009, sixty-seven years later. Open your heart to John Ford’s film and his worldview — if you are a conservative who cares at all about our military, past and present, it’s something you will never forget.

As a chaser, interested parties can read an oral history transcript of John Ford describing his wartime service and the filming of The Battle of Midway at the Naval Historical Center website.

Growing Up in Hollywood and Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. These two volumes of reminiscences by former child actor and Oscar-winning film editor Robert Parrish contain lots of great stories about the movie business, with plenty of first-hand tales of John Ford in all of his perplexing, frustrating, tyrannical, monumental genius. In particular, he provides a more detailed look into the making of The Battle of Midway than what could be summarized here. The sheer daring and cleverness of Ford as he crustily keeps The Battle of Midway one step ahead of the Navy’s censors and bureaucratic roadblocks is thrilling to read.

No kidding, professor.

No, really, they are. I don’t mean in all the right places, of course, but somewhere else, with movies, in enjoying the things we see in the movies. 

I remember seeing Gunga Din (1939) for the first time and knowing from the opening shot that this was my kind of film. This was a guy film. Not a wishy-washy movie filled up with dance numbers and kissing scenes, but a guy flick. Great guy stuff was in this movie, and I was sold on it from the first pounding of that thunderous mighty gong. When Alfred Newman’s score turned from playful to ominous faster than you can say, ‘trouble in Tantrapur’, I knew I was in for a good one. This was the kind of movie you watched on a Saturday afternoon with your dad or with your pals. This was adventure! 

There’s no way, I had always thought, that a girl can appreciate this kind of film, that she can ‘get into’ Gunga Din and get out of it what I got out of it. There’s just no way. Would she be able to feel the same way I did, the way other guys do, when watching Victor McLaglen face quickly turn from stone to fraudulent smile as he tries to trick his buddy? Can she feel the same rush of pride when hearing the trumpet scream the battle cry, or when seeing the Sikh Cavalry charge against the 400 horsemen of Kali? Does she get choked up along with Mac, Cutter and Bal when Montagu Love reads Kipling’s reflective poem in that final scene? Is modern woman capable of this? Or will she be more concerned with the sole female character in the story, trying, naturally, to relate to her instead? These things I wondered. Yet, I was as certain of the answers to these questions as I was of Sergeant Ballantine’s destiny. No woman could do these things, bridge that crevasse away from the familiar into pure guy territory, where it’s always double drill and no canteen. It just isn’t done. 

But guess what? I was wrong. Completely wrong. In fact, I’ll go out on an already shaky rope bridge here and state I’ve never met a woman who didn’t like Gunga Din. That’s right, not one.  Sure, it’s got funny and handsome Cary Grant – what woman doesn’t love Cary? For that matter, what man doesn’t want to be him, including? And it’s got the dashing Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with that infectious smile and shock of hair that falls down great when he lunges with either saber, pistol or right hook into an opponent.  I mean, let’s face it, what female doesn’t like to watch these two guys at rest or in motion? But that’s not it, that’s not the reason they like Gunga Din, well not completely, anyway. 

I believe it’s actually closer to what happens in the scene in the temple when our three British soldiers plus one, are caught and imprisoned in the confines of that locked dungeon, complete with pit of snakes. Comically, with torture and certain death if they don’t figure a way out soon, all the ‘proud ox’ MacChesney can think of is retrieving Sergeant Ballantine’s signed reenlistment form, securing his buddy’s companionship and saving him from what he believes is a death far worse than any pit of snakes could ever inflict: married life.  The means he goes about trying to get his hands on that paper is a joy to behold. His phony fear of snakes and being lashed again is, like so many other Victor McLaglen moments, lovable and priceless.  It really is, I believe, this kind of friendly sparring and not so much the looks and charm of the other two leading men, that is the key. The loyalty, friendship and devotion to one’s chums, the camaraderie replete with fun-loving jabs and good natured mocking is what wins the day for the viewer and makes these kinds of films work so well and on so many personally appealing levels.   

An equally shocking discovery I made about Gunga Din is that not only do the women I know love this movie, but that they dislike the love interest, the fiance, Emmy with equal passion. No, not for the cliched reasons like ‘she’s not a strong character’ and all that baloney. No, that’s not it. And anyway, it’s not true since, under the circumstances, she’s pretty darn strong. So what don’t they like about her? The same thing George Stevens, Ben Hecht and I don’t like about her. They hate what she’s trying to do. The women I know hate the fact that Sergeant Ballantine’s lover wants to take him away from his pals, from the adventure, from life itself, to go into the tea business, of all things. They, like Cutter and Mac, want that siren to fail.

In real life there are not many women who would give up a life of luxury, lucrative profits in a very promising business in order to let a husband run off and reenlist in the thankless job of Her Majesty’s service. Nor are there many women who want their men to go up against elephants on rope bridges or Kali worshiping stranglers as a line of work. Not many at all. Probably not even one. And that makes a lot of sense. So, why do women when watching Gunga Din want Bal to join Cutter and Mac (and Din) and do precisely that in the movie? Is the answer simply to be explained away as yet another unfathomable layer of the complex nature of woman, the incomprehensibility of the fairer sex to the brutish mind of man? 

Beats me. 

So, I asked myself, why do women want a fellow woman’s plans stopped, granted not in the same feverish way Eduardo Ciannelli’s high priest wants to stop the British Empire with his much copied crescendo-building “Kill for the Love of Killing” speech, but definitely stopped. Why do women want Cutter and Mac to succeed in their scheme to reenlist their friend and take him away from the woman in the story?  This question puzzled me. It nagged at my inner man. Then, one day, quite unexpectedly,  I had an epiphany, a stroke of genius. It was one of those ‘eureka moments’, the kind you hear about, the kind that make you jump out of the bath, covered in soapy suds and run out into the street yelling at the top of your lungs, “I’VE GOT IT!! I’VE GOT IT!!” 

For the record, I’d suggest not expressing yourself in that way, exactly. Unless, of course you have a very good lawyer or a burning desire to see the inside of a psychiatric ward.  I have neither, so it’s fortunate that I came to my senses before I cleared the door jam and therefore was not forced to scribe this article onto a thick stone wall with a dull spoon. 

What I figured out amongst the bubbles was this: Women want men. Again, no kidding. No, hold on. That’s not it, exactly. Women want other men. Wait a minute, that’s not quite right, either. Let’s try again. Women want what other women want and that includes men. Yeah, that’s what I mean, sort of. 

Or to put it another way, in the form of a question, I came up with this: What woman, besides Joan Fontaine’s Emmy, would desire a domesticated Douglas Fairbanks who does very little else aside from selling tea and reading the paper? None. What woman would want a Douglas Fairbanks riding a horse, crossing swords with bad guys, getting trapped, imprisoned, escaping “by sheer strategy alone” and saving not only his chums, but the whole bloomin’ regiment, king and country, with a little help from his friends? 

Every woman, that’s who! At least I think so. 

Because, that’s the figure of a man. A man acts. He doesn’t necessarily think. For good or bad, he just does. And then another revelation occurred to me, not at the same time, thankfully, and not involving suds, but still noteworthy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a theory about men and women and it sort of ties in with all of this. I’ll restate part of it here briefly:

Men are simple. Women are complicated. 

Men live in the past. Women live in the future.  

(I have a sneaking suspicion children are the only ones who live in the present)

Here’s the big one: 

Women plan. Men dream.

When men become more like women – no not that way -  but when they stop dreaming as men dream, stop being reckless, stop living the adventure, stop thinking anything is possible (even if it clearly isn’t), stop acting, stop doing, when they cease to do these things, be these things, something has happened to them. 

They’ve grown old.

What I mean is, they’ve given up the ability to dream. They may not be old in years, but in spirit they are dusty cobwebs. They may not even know it happened to them until much later, well after the woman in their lives knows it. That’s something I’ll have to remind myself of from time to time, no doubt. 

When I think on other films that are called ‘guy flicks’ or ‘buddy movies’ there are so many that I love that I won’t even attempt to begin to list them. I will say, though, that along with Gunga Din (1939), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Sea Hawk (1940), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Sahara (1943), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) are some of my favorite guy movies of all time, which honor things like honor, duty and the undying capacity to dream large, even when all around them is a nightmare. These are films I never get tired of watching, nor ever will. There are others, lots more, and even some that are more recent, that have similar appeal. Braveheart comes to mind. But for the most part, these newer films are missing something that their predecessors have.  Maybe it’s the technicolor, or the monochrome for that matter, or just maybe, it’s the writing, the way in which dialogue plays such a dominant role in shaping the characters. I tend to think that’s the reason. Then again, maybe it’s just because I saw most of them as a kid. Who knows? Not me, and frankly, I don’t think I really want to know.  Because I’d rather dream. 

But, yes, these are some of my favorites, and it’s interesting that all of them, yes, all of them, are some of my female friends’ favorites as well. What does that say? That I hang around a bunch of butch chicks? No, I hope it doesn’t say that. It says that there are films about men, that don’t get all mushy, that women truly love for the same reasons men do. It says that women can sit and watch a film about men with no female character they can associate with, or even like in the story and come away thoroughly thrilled at the outcome. 

So, are these guy flicks, or not? I guess not. They’re more than that. They’re great flicks. They speak to both men and women as loud and clear as Din’s trumpeting. But how are they able to do that? What do they have in common? They were all written by people who could write. Sure they are genre, but they aren’t hackneyed, formulaic. And most of all, they weren’t supposed to appeal to just men, or just women, or just kids, or just adults. They were meant to be enjoyed by everyone. Their message however politically incorrect some may find it, is universal.  And that’s why they are hard to find nowadays. Because today, it’s all about pitching to a niche. Everything has to have a target audience, a market to aim for, a demographic to appease, please and all to often, pander to. 

Great films don’t do that. Not guy flicks, not chick flicks, not any flicks. Great is great. And great films charge ahead into the breech not caring what this or that group thinks is proper or offensive. We’re missing that kind of courage today.  And our culture is suffering because of it.  These days, we hear a lot about so-called controversial films. Yet no filmmaker seems daring enough to take a chance at being great, at dreaming large. Why should they when it’s so much easier to pander? 

There’s a scene in another great, though entirely different film that captures and defines the essence of what a man is, what he wishes he was, and what he wants other men to see him as. 

At the end of The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager takes his Lockheed F-104 Starfighter up to where the sky ends and space itself begins. He’s so far up that there isn’t enough oxygen in the air to fully power the turbine anymore. His engine quits. He spins out of control amongst the vast stars and great heavens above, falling to earth like Icarus with melted wings. 

But unlike the Greek, there is no ocean to catch him. Only the brutally harsh and unforgiving desert of Edwards. 

With frantic eyes peering past hope at the funereal black smoke on the horizon, the ambulance driver suddenly spots a lone figure in the distance walking toward them, shimmering in the blurry heat like a mirage – or a god. We see he is burnt, bloody and limping. It’s Yeager, and he’s carrying his helmet and parachute. 

“Is that a man?”, the driver asks Ridley, fellow test pilot and Yeager’s best friend. 

Grinning ear to ear, Ridley replies, “You’re damn right it is!”

Something tells me Emmy would agree.