In an era of all-star WWII movies dealing with recreations of famous battles (The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge), Cornel Wilde's Beach Red (1967) was an anomaly. Fiercely independent, strongly experimental, and brimming with a cast of (mostly) unknowns, Beach Red was both a throwback and something new - an old-fashioned 1940s-style combat film of a group of Marines on a mission, but done in color with the horrors of war shown in graphic detail (i.e., blood, dismemberment, vomit, etc). The movie has very little in the way of plot. A company of Marines lands on a small Pacific island and storms the beach in a violent assault which takes up over 30 minutes of screen time. Then they advance into the jungle to take the rest of the island from Japanese occupiers.

There are no standard heroics to be found in Beach Red. Every man is scared, from the top on down. Every man wants simply to survive and get home to his family. In a strangely powerful device, we hear soldiers' thoughts as voiceovers, and we see their fears, fanatsies and memories as a mixture of filmed flashbacks and still photographs. This device is applied to both American and Japanese soldiers, and the effect, rather than being distancing, is intensely subjective and humanizing. Nationality is unimportant in Beach Red; we see Japanese soldiers crying over their fallen soldiers and dreaming of their wives and children, too. The point is that all these men's lives have been interrupted by war, and that all are united by their fears, their humanity, and their one desire - to return home.

Producer-director Cornel Wilde was an interesting, intelligent filmmaker. A heartthrob movie star of the 1940s, he veered into directing in the 1950s and produced and directed a number of independent films from then on. Some were better than others, with Beach Red and The Naked Prey (1966) the best of the bunch. Most showed an intriguing experimental side - The Naked Prey was, after its first few minutes, entirely dialogue-free. In Beach Red, Wilde created the "filmed thoughts" by blowing up stills into transparencies and re-photographing them with camera moves and optical effects involving color, diffusion, texture, zooms and dissolves.

Beach Red received mixed reviews and found few audiences. However, it was without question hugely influential - even if that influence didn't exert itself for decades. The opening of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), with its 30-minute assault on the Normandy beaches, owes a great deal to Beach Red's opening sequence. While Spielberg's beach scene is more impressive on a technical level, Wilde's has more impact emotionally, which makes it in many ways the more powerful of the two. Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) lifted even more from Beach Red, with its characters' thoughts heard as voiceovers, its constant emphasis on nature amid the carnage, and its overall narrative setup of a company of Marines overtaking a nameless Pacific island. (The similarities between the two pictures are actually quite startling.) Oliver Stone, director of Platoon, has also cited Beach Red as an influence.

Beach Red is blunt, somewhat crude and at times even clumsy, but it exerts an undeniable power akin to Sam Fuller's movies. The opening beach landing lasts about 40 minutes to the point where the troops reach the jungle, and it is almost pure combat. The bullets never stop flying during this sequence - except for some brief "filmed thought" interludes - and Wilde pulls no punches in depicting the carnage and horror. He shows flamethrowers, charred bodies, severed limbs, Japanese machine guns firing endlessly. He later wrote of wanting to create a "fear of the unseen" and "to show audiences it hurts getting shot." Like Sam Fuller, he was interested in making as honest a war movie as possible. Beach Red's stunner of an ending is a succinct comment on the futility of war and is on a par with the best of Fuller.

Of the cast, Wilde said, "I surrounded Rip Torn and myself with unknowns so the audience could become totally involved in the war." The strategy basically works, but the drawback lies in some of the scenes where these unknowns have dialogue with each other. Their acting inexperience is far too apparent, especially in contrast to Torn, excellent as a tough sergeant, and Wilde himself as a sympathetic commanding officer who treats his soldiers like sons and has gained their utmost respect.

According to Wilde, the shoot was an arduous one. They shot in the Philippines, on the island of Luzon, for seven weeks. Four typhoons hit over that time. The night before Wilde started shooting the beach assault, three crew members deserted the project and went back to the States, and it took a while for Wilde to find replacements. For the three major battles in the film, Wilde was often using 3-6 cameras at a time. He also had his actors carry the regulation 42 pounds of equipment on their backs at all times. Returning to Hollywood with miles of footage, Wilde and editor Frank Keller cut for 21 weeks before emerging with a 104-minute film. Keller was rewarded with an Oscar® nomination.

Wilde shot Beach Red with the full cooperation of the U.S. military (as well as the Philippine Navy, whose ships appear in the beginning). 2300 real-life Marines stormed the beach with the cast, and American planes and tanks were also borrowed. When the Pentagon saw the finished product, however, it asked Wilde to remove its acknowledgement in the credits because of the strong antiwar tone of the picture. This was even though Wilde had gone over "every comma" of the script with Pentagon technical advisers all through the filming. "I guess they really didn't visualize from the screenplay the way it would come out on film," Wilde told Variety. He agreed to remove the credit, leaving in the acknowledgements of Philippine military assistance.

Wilde's wife, actress Jean Wallace, plays his character's wife in flashbacks and also sings the film's somber title song, which is heard over a credit sequence montage of beautiful oil paintings depicting family life and combat images. The song is good, but some of the orchestrations heard in the movie are awkward and inappropriate.

MGM Home Entertainment's DVD of Beach Red features a pretty good though not crystal-clean transfer, with mono sound. The stock footage (most of it naval) looks worse than the rest of the film, which is to be expected. It's a flipper disc, with the letterboxed original 1.85:1 movie on one side and the so-called "full-frame" version on the other. The original trailer is included. A featurette or commentary with Rip Torn would have been fascinating, but alas, MGM either didn't know or didn't care about this movie's significance.

For more information about Beach Red, visit MGM Home Entertainment. To order Beach Red, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold