berfedd
Plot: Tough company sergeant Jack Warden and maverick infantryman Keir Dullea battle their way – both with the enemy and each other – across the killing fields of Guadalcanal during World War II.Review: Not quite the classic I expected. Rather uneven at times, especially during the earlier part of the film with some suspect acting and an awful lot of unnecessary explanation. Thankfully it is held together by the two lead performances – Jack Warden (a Hollywood stalwart) and Keir Dullea (better known as the astronaut Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey).The movie graphically depicts the horror and mercilessness of combat, an experience which gradually sends Dullea round the bend. Warden's character, an unrepentantly hard-nosed company sergeant, never bats an eyelid. The two manage a sort of working relationship as events progress, but Dullea is an incomprehensible dreamer as far as Warden is concerned, while Warden represent everything that is wrong in the world to Dullea.It was good to see Dullea in action, knowing him only from 2001. He comes across as a sort of mild Clint Eastwood – quietly spoken, thoughtful, singular, and probably with numerous issues going on behind his curious stare. Warden, a good character actor most familiar as one of the jurors in 12 Angry Men, must have drawn a lot on his own experiences as a sergeant in WWII.I'm not sure what the movie was trying to say, but it definitely cannot be accused of glamorising war. It is the grim tale of men killing, being killed, and being driven to and beyond their limits for hopefully the greater good.
davidfurlotte
In all fairness, I enjoyed this movie but that might be because I have a soft spot for B&W war flicks from the 60's.The acting isn't worthy of an Oscar but it is passable, other than the guy portraying Doll. In fact, he was the one character that I wanted to grab and shake because he was over-acting his part to the point where really just wanted to hurt him.What I could not understand about this movie though were the mistakes by the armourer of the flick. The first mistake was having the two Japanese machine gun positions initially using U.S. Browning .30 cal. M1919A4s. (Now this one COULD be forgiven because maybe they could have captured them from the Marines who came before the army, although I'm pretty sure the Marines were using M1917 during Guadalcanal.) However, the ONE mistake that could not be explained away was Doll and Welsh and some others using German MP 40's and MP 3008 Machine Pistols. Really? Really! There HAD to have been some Thompson sub-machine guns floating around somewhere, almost EVERY movie from the 50's, 60's and 70's made an effort to get THAT right. If the armourer was trying to make us think they were carrying M3 Grease Guns, he failed miserably.All in all, good flick so I DO suggest you see it.
tieman64
"A new motto: If you can't trans-cend, you might as well des-cend. I'm scoping out the bottom here....Mass, Density. Permanence. Finality. Termination. Rock. Even the word conveys heft, a certain assurance. No loss of focus here." – "Meditations in Green" (Stephen Wright)Film lags behind most other fields, mediums and art-forms, and so its no surprise that even over half a century after its release, few war films have been able to match the power of James Jones' novel, "The Thin Red Line".The second book in his WW2 trilogy, Jones' novel told the story of Charlie company and their participation in the battle of Guadalcanal. But what stood out about "Line" was the way it read more like a Vietnam precursor than a novel about WW2. Having himself fought at Guadlacanal, Jones had no time for the usual "greatest generation" and "noble war" fabrications. His novel was filled with drunks, cowards, thieves, sodomites, slackers, homosexuals and only occasionally heroes. His grunts battled mind-numbing tedium, fatigue, disease, nature, each other and their officers as much as they did the Japanese, and when victories were won, they were fairly meaningless. "It's just a fight over property," one character sighs.But for Jones, war was more than an overpowering injustice. His characters were separated into those who found themselves trapped in an indeterministic universe, wholly overwhelmed by circumstance, and those who turned war into a private struggle, a means of finding existential authenticity. This polarity is typical of war novels of the era, the theme of individuals as mere cogs in the war machine introduced by master authors like Dos Passos ("Through the Wheat" and "Three Soldiers") and Thomas Boyd and carried on in the works of artists like Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Stephen Wright, William March, and James Jones. Heavily influenced by post war existentialism, all these novelists offered only the faintest suggestion of hope for the individual.So beyond war, these artists used combat as an avenue to examine the plight of the individual caught up in and beleaguered by our twentieth century industry culture, the battlefield experience standing in for political and social cognition in our time. Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead", for example, envisions a ruthlessly naturalistic world in which the so-called "rugged individual" is non-existent. Those who aspire to that state, such as Mailer's Sergeant Croft, are inevitably thwarted by circumstance. Likewise the heroes of William March's "Company K", Mailer's "The Naked And The Dead" and Heller's "Catch 22", all centring on characters trying to take a stand for personal, existential freedom against impossible odds. For these authors, free choice is not possible; we choose based upon economic necessities, upon psychic drives, or upon the indoctrination of our social upbringing.The intersection of this impotence with the impersonal, parasitic nature of warfare (war as a grotesque extension of the corporate/economic/political world), turns up again in Jones' own "The Thin Red Line", where the author has his characters Bell and Welsh see the individual as irrelevant and of little interest or worth to anyone but himself, whilst his characters Doll and Fife are shown to be nothing but a reflection of the opinions of others.But Jones always went further than trendy existentialism and one-note defeatism. What his novels did was set up oppositions, or opposing ideologies, and set them at war. Observe how he has one pair of characters embody different philosophical positions: for one soldier, if a human's actions are beyond his or her control, then the cause of war is irrelevant and inescapable. For the other, if war is a product of human choice, then three general groupings of causation - biological, cultural, and reason – can be identified and confronted.This method of philosophical investigation continues throughout the novel. Another pair of characters, for example, battle over whether or not war is ever morally justifiable. One symbolises war (or non-confrontation) from an ethical perspective – akin to St Aquinas' writings on "Just War" - while the other views war as an all-pervasive phenomenon of the universe. Such a description corresponds to a Heraclitean ("War is the father of all things") or Hegelian philosophy in which change (physical, social, political, economical, etc) can only arise out of conflict.Sandwiched between the WW2 masters and the next wave of great war novelists (Michael Herr, Neil Sheehan, Robert Mason, Philip Caputo, Gustav Hasford, Michael Maclear), director Andrew Marton's film adaptation of Jones' "Line" is an odd beast. It doesn't have the thematic weight or dramatic power of Jones' novel, but in the context of the other (mostly dumb) war movies released in the late 50s and early 60s, it's a remarkable film, an odd clash between grungy New Wave aesthetics, raw (not quite method) acting, and the stiff conventions of Old Hollywood. Unfortunately the film received little promotion and quickly faded into obscurity and is today mostly known for featuring an early performance by actor Keir Dullea.Decades later, "Line" would once again be adapted, this time by director Terrence Malick. Upon its release, many derided Malick's film for revoking or reversing the philosophy of Jones' novel, writers painting Malick as some kind of hippie spiritualist who turned war into a "natural", "poetic thing", a stark contrast to the cold, industrial and absurdist universe of Jones. Such a misreading is common, but not true.7.9/10 – Few war movies pass my BS-meter, but this one creaks through. These platoon movies tend to have a smallness – a myopia typical of a grunt's-eye-view - which is very unsatisfying, but Jones' writing is so strong, his lingo so beautiful, that Marton's flick is elevated by dint of sheer association. Even an auteur like Malick is massively indebted to Jones, some of the best moments and characters in his adaptation (Malick's cynical Sean Penn character even pops up in many of Jones' short stories – a surrogate for the writer) owing a lot to Jones' pen.
kayaker36
When you wanted to portray toughness, the late Jack Warden was one of the first actors who came to mind. He often played persons in authority positions, as in the TV series "N.Y.P.D." and "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" (in both, a captain).In this movie he plays a top sergeant in the Army, the man who will keep you alive no matter how ruthless an enemy you will face. He's no sweetheart. He's nobody's buddy but he is cool under fire, wise, experienced and no mean player at psychological games. When some green and incautious solders in his platoon want to pick up some war souvenirs at the start of the film, it is the sergeant who casually demonstrates that the soldiers have come within an ace of getting themselves blown up. The "souvenirs" were booby trapped by the cruel, clever Japanese! In counterpoint is the character of Pvt. Doll--young, delicate looking, self-contained, and determined to survive. The casting of Kier Dullea with his expressive eyes was spot on. When Guadalcanal is mentioned most people think of the Marines. The Marines did fight a tough and heroic campaign on that island. However, the Marines were eventually relieved by the Army. The Army was left to clean out what remained of the Japanese on Guadalcanal, particularly a strongly held natural feature: Mt. Austen, called the "Dancing Elephant" in the movie but in history the "Galloping Horse" because of its shape.The story centers on the taking of Mt. Austen by the Army, with the full horror of facing for the first time an enemy determined to fight to the last man.No movie I have ever seen captures so perfectly the grimness of war, its squalor, occasional moments of exultation and the byplay of men at different levels of command but all trapped in an essentially insane situation.
