Slow Down Soldiers, the War is Over

 

Whatever Else He Might Be, Veteran William Bendix Will Not Be Revealed as a Killer in The Blue Dahlia

Postwar Push to Tame Former Fighters --- Part Two

Not a few were apprehensive about returning servicemen. Hadn’t many killed as part of duty to their country? What of such impulse remained? PTSD was years away from being properly understood, or so medics tell us. Films were careful not to cast war wounded as subsequent killers. William Bendix comes home with a steel plate in his head and seems capable of home ground killing in The Blue Dahlia, this initial outcome for the story till wiser heads warned that it was no good letting a troubled vet be also a murderer. Humphrey Bogart and William Prince in Dead Reckoning arrive stateside to be ribboned for valor till events get latter killed and starts former investigating. Violence committed will be by civilians who stayed home while hero Bogart fought a clean war and wants justice not with guns till forced so by criminals worse than enemies he faced overseas. Dick Powell won’t be shed of war worries till he finds fascist holdovers responsible for his French wife’s death (Cornered), him tending to unfinished business as opposed to mere killing out of uniform. No one’s combat was over so long as war criminals ran loose, this why Alan Ladd goes back to Italy as Captain Carey USA, his license to kill renewed thanks to traitors who’d not yet answered for their acts. For most warriors returning, issues were simple as getting back families and hopefully the old job, deeper troubles explored but more tolerably so by support casts, Robert Mitchum in Till the End of Time, brave-cast and performing Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives. Not comforting were servicemen resorting to fists, let alone weapons, when minor things go wrong, like when Russell’s Homer attacks “Mr. Mollett” in a drug store for ill-chose words, followed by Dana Andrews’ Fred Derry laying a roundhouse blow to show shocked onlookers that here is a veteran far from rehabilitated.

Thanks for breakfast, Ma. Now let me tell you about stinking foxholes.

Way with firearms and bayonets was stuff of ended war and no longer to be admired. Those who had fought most fiercely would be scrap like bombers not wanted now that peace was won. We needed John Wayne as Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima to take that island enroute to victory, but once done, as in 1949 when the movie came out, there’d be no place for Stryker’s sort of emphatic warring, him dying preferred coda for his kind of soldiering. Sensitive sort like John Agar with marriage and family plans will better appreciate and enjoy the peace. What we dealt with on real life terms was disabusing former enemies of ideas to renew offensive, thus Japan stripped of its military and German citizens obliged to “de-Nazify,” a process heavier than inadequate Allied personnel could hoist. Movies confronted same but on comfort terms of kidding it with 1948’s A Foreign Affair, or same year’s bath in sentiment that was The Search. Biggest domestic worry was making sure muster-out meant leaving violent inclination behind. Civilians discomfited by what returned men had gone through was part-why wisest of those men chose never to speak of combat experiences. Cliff Harper’s mother in Till the End of Time doesn’t want to hear of “stinking foxholes” while serving waffles she has lovingly prepared. Mom just wants her boy back intact and more/less what he was before leaving home four years ago. Gregory Peck shocks Jennifer Jones in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by telling her he killed seventeen men close-up, as in “I could see their faces,” not something she would ever want to know, but stress and circumstance forces his hand, and out it comes.

Let Me Alone with My Memories and Regrets, says Ex-Gunslinger Johnny Ringo. How Many Troubled Vets Identified With Him?

PTSD as a plot driver wasn’t often used. “Shell-shock” for explanation might come up, or general malaise over experiences in a war, for instance Tyrone Power haunted over incidents from the Great War in period-set The Razor’s Edge, his recite of combat horror focused more on what he observed rather than acts he committed. It was vital for ex-servicemen to maintain calm after coming home. Any sort of violent expression was best left at European or Pacific fronts. A last thing wanted, especially by movies, was veterans as objects of fear or dread. Man’s penchant toward force was better explored in westerns and a time period wherein aggression could be a natural, in fact necessary, survival mechanism. Even there might be post-war messaging, old guard John Wayne in Red River given to shoot-first philosophy countered and eventually displaced by progressive Montgomery Clift who is equally good with a gun but is loathe to use it. Audiences were said to be shocked when James Stewart rammed Dan Duryea’s face against a bar counter in Winchester’73, but it was Stewart’s expression when doing it that chilled them more, for here was a man out of control, momentarily, but all the time it takes to kill. Stewart having served and in thick of action lent layers to western work he’d do, a reason why he found popularity with the genre, not for nothing that Universal limited outbursts for follow-up Bend of the River and family-friendlier Stewarts to come. Westerns otherwise spoke a same, killer ways belonging to pasts to now be lived down, sometimes death a better penance to pay. Gregory Peck as The Gunfighter does his title deeds prior to events we see, but it’s enough to be told how lethal he once was and how doomed he now is for past acts. To kill even in self-defense was fainter excuse to kill by post-war reckoning.

Such as These Never Played Fair, and We Could Wonder How Heroes Ever Prevailed

Shane rides into a lawless valley, saves homesteader’s bacon, but must ride off alone for having relied on his sidearm. Ingrates don’t want Shane around their picnic and won’t recognize his ridding them of threat that is the Ryker brothers plus deadly minions. Violence however applied was to be abhorred, a stiff price paid by every man who protects. Director George Stevens very deliberately let Elisha Cook Jr. be projected backward with Jack Palance’s pistol fire to convey what a bullet could do, Stevens shunning “comfortable” deaths movies had dealt before war service taught the director what it really meant to be shot. Rock Hudson serves a prison term for outlawry in The Lawless Breed and is afterward repelled by guns, but is it too late to prevent a teenaged son emulating his past? Again the sacrifice must be supreme. To kill for any reason was to be forever marked, to kill for revenge meant consign to a hell of one’s own from which there’d be no return or redemption. Gregory Peck in The Bravados (1958) prays he’ll be forgiven for offing the wrong men for assault and murder of his wife, Henry King as director exacting a high-as-Stevens toll upon men leaving law to follow vigilante impulse. Both Stevens and King spoke specifically to their westerns as statements, King old enough not to have been active in the last war, but knowing from experience how to make his message felt. Against contemporary settings came film noir, not defined as such during its heyday, but oft-engaged by war themes and what effects lingered from service abroad. Noirists who were veterans tended to be more sinned against than sinning. They walked alone like John Hodiak (Somewhere in the Night) or watched each other’s back like ex-servicemen in Crossfire. Glenn Ford has old war buddies in The Big Heat to protect his little daughter from vengeful hoodlum Lee Marvin, but thankfully they aren’t called upon to use their weapons. Bad women in noir could tempt veterans they knew had at least potential for violent action. Gloria Grahame reminds Glenn Ford in Human Desire that after all, he killed in war, so why not now when he can have her plus a cache of money for easy act of doing away with her husband?

These Two Fought Like Mad Dogs for Twelve Whole Chapters. Wore Me Out!

Deadly force was better presented as abstraction, a child’s world as lived in Grimm fairy tales, or “Action” as supplied by serials, cartoons, and B westerns, punches endlessly thrown but nobody shown to die. Seldom did cowboys spill blood. If a gun was shot from a miscreant’s hand, we’d not see holes in a thumb or forefinger as one might expect in real life. Chapterplay combatants fisted copiously, one I lately saw Republic’s Government Agents vs. Phantom Legion being twelve chapters of two goodies fighting same two baddies to repetitive chorus of breakaway chairs and staccato music striking same notes over and again. Mouse Trouble of recent view has Tom reading a book on how to subdue Jerry, him in receipt of dynamite with a fuse that ignites the instant he lights it. In fact, all violence directed to child audiences was “cartoonish” as in harmless, unlike with for-general-patronage features where stakes were, as with life, much higher. Irony was that as roughness ramped with abandonment of the Code, public (read nanny) concern was redirected toward taming of cartoon content, not just new ones, but those older as well, thus cat Tom, Warners’ Coyote, the rest (plus us), denied effects of explosions. Grown-up models for conduct, that is male stars burdened by “responsibility,” could no more shoot first or in cold blood than would Roy Rogers or Rex Allen, never mind how they might be abused by heavies, latter having lots more fun it seemed. Well, who would you rather be, Jack Palance or Elisha Cook, Jr.? Mainstream names after the war adjusted their image to fight fair but be rugged doing so. James Stewart could be neurotic and obsessive, but as with government agents against phantom legionnaires, he’d never shoot a man from behind.

Greg Waits Ten Years to Tell Wife JJ of Wartime Killing Experience, Then Empties Both Barrels When Stress Gets a Better of Him

People still say John Wayne was simplistic with his image and presentation, but I don’t think so. His were several personas over a long stay on screens, notable one I call his “Gentle Giant” phase. This was after the war, leading men in contact with gentler selves. Yes, there was Red River and Sands of Iwo Jima for Wayne, but also there came Angel and the Badman, Tycoon, more where he could be courtly to women, less argumentative perhaps with men. Age became him in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. He’d be a right Dad and coach to football player boys in Trouble Along the Way, refreshing to those who’d thought Wayne too hard a tack. The Quiet Man, then Hondo, capped move toward a man women and children could gravitate to, Wayne’s image done with shoot-first and now ready to meet halfway if not more with domesticity and civic responsibility. Postwar Wayne could also be sad in isolation. His characters serve useful purpose in The High and the Mighty and The Searchers, but pasts haunt in both and there seems no route back to a community’s embrace. These and others gave texture to the Wayne image till sixties, and his approaching 60’s, went patriarchal direction, less interesting, but then age as we all learn offers fewer options. Wayne could never have borrowed Clint Eastwood’s act (closest: McQ), Eastwood ultimately borrowing Wayne’s with Unforgiven long after his senior model was gone. Influences from, and behaviors modified, by the war peaked, then fell as the fifties gave way to changed attitude of the sixties. Gregory Peck as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit seriously pondered his war traumas, saw ten-years later life changed by them, then scant five years further found the actor taking down German armor at Navarone to show how we need study war no more at serious levels. Whatever job Peck plus associates started, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, numerous others, would finish.