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SANDS
OF IWO JIMA (1949)
Director: Allan Dwan.
Writers: Harry Brown, James Edward Grant.
Starring: John Wayne, John Agar, Adele Mara, Forrest Tucker,
Wally Cassell, James Brown, Richard Webb, Arthur Franz, Julie
Bishop, James Holden, Peter Coe, Richard Jaeckel, William
Murphy, George Tyne.
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Poffy
Jima
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Jingo
All The Way.
by
Jon Dunmore © 24 Nov 2006.
John
Wayne drawls his way through yet another war movie where thirty-something
teenagers with clean shirts and Christian mouths storm battlegrounds
where they die operatically from bullets that don't make exit
wounds; powerful enough in its day to be regarded a "classic,"
Sands of Iwo Jima elevated Wayne from studio standard
to worldwide megastar.
But it's kinda laughable now.
This
Allan Dwan-directed film, exploiting the hot topic of the
most reproduced photo of World War II (Joe Rosenthal's shot
of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima), exhibits that same snide
jingoism every American or British production fell victim
to during that war-mongering epoch. In 2006, the public incessantly
whines that 9-11 "entertainment media" is produced
too close on the heels of the actual event, yet WWII movies
were being churned out not only on the coattails of the war,
but during the war itself. With no passage of time
at all to lend any perspective, these movies could crush a
foreigner's spine with their patriotic intensity.
Clean-cut American whitebread boys (with the odd Polack and
Mick thrown in for begrudging realism), meeting soft-focus
American blondes (from - er, New Zealand) and falling in love
after one night of Puritan necking, to give them motivation
to keep America free of races which don't look like Hitler
Youth.
John
Wayne is Sergeant Stryker, the tough-talking, hard-drinking,
platoon leader who molds his thirty-something teenage misfits
into a fighting unit proud and brave enough to storm a stock
footage beach in the Pacific - even if it takes dirty dancing
with one of them to do it; John Agar is the nancy-boy who
melodramatically finds love and can't shutup about it; big
Forrest Tucker, long before he makes an ass of himself on
F-Troop, makes an ass of himself here as a hard-hitting
ex-boxer and nemesis to Stryker; Richard Jaeckel, as always
looking more Nazi Youth than Apple Pie, provides comic relief
with an Aryan-looking brother of his, as does the token
Polack guy with the annoying Brooklyn accent.
Focusing
on Stryker's recruits long before Iwo Jima, the film's feature
battle is actually on Tarawa, with Iwo Jima's skirmish seemingly
an afterthought in the last few minutes of film. The flag-raising
- that absurd little habit of murdering conquerors which
inspired this movie's production - is given short shrift
and then embarrassingly staged, with the Rosenthal Position
dwelt upon just long enough to make anyone with an ounce
of real patriotism feel dirty.
Not
dwelt on enough are the cameos of the three surviving flag-raisers
(Rene Gagnon, John "Doc" Bradley and Ira Hayes),
who were elevated to hero status by a misguided nation and
slopped onto this movie's celluloid for ticket-selling effect,
yet who are bequeathed less than one-eyeblink's worth of
screen time in the movie's final five minutes. So much for
heroism.
Stock
footage from Tarawa and Iwo Jima is jarringly intercut with
Dwan's footage, and those studio sets that used to suffice
for outdoor locations (with more than two shadows giving
away the gag every time) just don't cut it in today's greenscreened
and special-effected universe. Adding to the pain, some
deliciously execrable performances by many of the one-liner
supporting cast. And as for war authenticity or factuality,
you would have been hard pressed to find any objective
or truthful account of the war during 1949 on American soil.
Sands - replete with conceptual, military and factual
flaws - was as "true" as you were going to get
in those days when bigotry was not only politically correct,
but encouraged like a national pastime.
END
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SANDS
OF IWO JIMA (1949)
Director: Allan Dwan.
Writers: Harry Brown, James Edward Grant.
Starring: John Wayne, John Agar, Adele Mara, Forrest Tucker,
Wally Cassell, James Brown, Richard Webb, Arthur Franz, Julie
Bishop, James Holden, Peter Coe, Richard Jaeckel, William
Murphy, George Tyne.
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