Like most Hollywood studios during World War II, RKO drew on war headlines and wartime newsreel footage to create this rousing actioner. The film focuses on the creation of the Marine Raiders, small hit-and-run units designed to take out strategic enemy outposts in the Pacific. Though they were instrumental in taking back Guadalcanal and other islands, they were disbanded months before the film named for them was released. Marine Raiders opens with the Battle of Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal in September 1942 and ends with the Bougainville landing in November 1943. In between RKO treats viewers to training scenes using footage from the Marine camps around San Diego, a romance between U.S. Marine Robert Ryan and Australian officer Ruth Hussey, an air raid and tension between Ryan and friend Pat O'Brien over Ryan's intentions to wed Hussey. The U.S. Armed Forces assisted in the making of the film, providing battle footage to be inserted into fictional scenes of combat. Director of photography Nicholas Musuraca used dim lighting for those scenes to disguise the fact that they were shot on an RKO sound stage. Their look anticipates the work he would do on such films noirs as Out of the Past (1947) and Where Danger Lives (1950).

By Frank Miller