For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and 'They Were Expendable' Part 2

“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:

[youtube dTSwf4N4bFo — click here to watch in full-screen HD]

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

For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Ford, John Wayne, and 'They Were Expendable' Part 2

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