SPROCKETED SOURCES - Battlegrounds.

In one of those curious accidents, in the last few days I saw two war movie separated by seventy years.

MGM’s 1945 This Man’s Navy is a companion piece to their They Were Expendable, except this time it’s Lighter Than Aircraft instead of P.T. boats and William Wellman instead of John Ford, both propping up a neglected arm of the WW2 military. Old Fly Boy Wellman, like Frank Capra making Dirigible, was obviously rapt with the size of the blimps, putting in background detail like a distant worker tiny, scrubbing the side of the  craft. 

The huge shapes, coming through the fog to be moored by lines of land crew of the opening, make the film’s best scene.

By this time Wally Beery was the movies' most self indulgent actor.  This Man’s Navy starts off with ridiculously old non-com Beery mugging away and telling tall tales at the blimp controls. Fellow veteran James Gleason ridicules his stories. Wally makes a parachute landing when his boxing instruction to the naval cadet sharing the basket of the weather balloon with him goes wrong, landing in Selena Royle’s recognisable, idealised MGM ranch setting. There Wally finds himself with young Tom Drake, who resembles the son he claims he had, though Tom proves to be on crutches after a horse riding accident.

Maudlin developments as Beery unofficially adopts the kid with his remarkably acquiescent mother going along with the gag for the benefit of Beery’s service mates. To liven up Tom’s love life, Wally recruits the appealing Jan Clayton, a recognisable Metro starlet of the day (think Janet Leigh or Donna Reed) who should have had a better career.

This Man's Navy - Drake & Clayton.

It’s a chat with fatherly Army Medic Sam Hinds, previously consulted for Wally’s alcohol problems, who gives an OK sign and an immediate cut to Tom cured and in a naval officer uniform. There’s a briefing on the mission (“You’re going to learn how to track submarines and kill them”) and, once aloft, they spot one. Wally ignores orders (“they’ll blast his ship out of the skies”) to wait for naval planes and makes a couple of bombing runs at the thing before its deck gun brings his blimp down - good action scene. 

Apparently only one L.T.A. was actually shot down during their remarkably successful convoy protection duties in WW2.

One of the dodgier passages in Borden Chase’s awful script, has Tom and Jan obscured Wellman style by a lounge back and him telling her “I wanted to run away” for which his answer is to transfer out of the L.T.A.s to Pensacola for pilot training, breaking old Wally’s heart - misunderstandings when Beery hears the pilots joking about his stories and leaves before Tom’s spirited defense.

Shipped to India, Beery finds his old elephant, off-putting Gleason, who thought he made that up, and they get transferred to Chunking where titled Paul Cavanagh in Tom’s plane is shot down by the Nips with Wally volunteering an L.T.A. craft rescue, using cloud cover that fails.

This Man's Navy - Drake, Gleason and Beery aloft.

 Despite obvious model shots this does generate suspense, complete with the oldies’ parachute jumping to lighten the damaged balloon. Cheer worthy moment as the navy planes appear in the sky backed by “Here we go into the Wide Blue Yonder...”. Nathaniel Shilkret’s score is suitably rousing throughout. 

 

Comic ending to come.

Flag waving dates the piece. It’s all a reminder of how phony and over produced 1945 Metro A features could be and a waste of Wellman’s skills but it still manages to hold attention with a layer of nostalgia to help it out. The comic duo of Beery and Gleason work hard but they need better material. There’s a soso Peter Ballbush (The Victor Fleming Dr. J. & Mr. H., Scaramouche, Scarlet Empress) training montage and glimpses of young Blake Edwards and an ailing Noah Beery. The You Tube copy is good.

It’s totally different and remarkably similar to Zhang jin hu  / The Battle at Lake Changjin, on which the talents of at least six directors were deployed, including Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, Dante Lam and Andrew Lau. It's the current Big Chinese production, their most expensive effort and now number one on their Top Box Office list,

In this one, it’s 1950 and a seventy thousand plus US force is advancing on the Yalu river border and carpet bombing North Korea - impressive model and drone footage reminiscent of the John Woo Chi Bi / Red Cliff. The People’s Volunteer Army are deployed to fight the Americans who have dared to cross the 38th parallel and send a fleet into the Formosa straights - Koreans, Poles, Turks - and Australians (what Australians?) don’t rate a mention. This one is about the time that the Chinese military unofficially went to war with the better resourced US - and handed them their asses.

The Battle at Lake Changjin - Wu Jing.

Company commander Wu (Wolf Warriors) Jing, with the urn of the ashes of his soldier brother, is on Autumn leave  headed to his  fishing village home in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, Eastern China. Like Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, all it takes is one wide screen single to convince us that he is someone of rugged integrity. Despite their loss, he is able to encourage his floating family parents Li Jun & Cao Yang with the news that Chairman Mao has given them a three quarters of an acre block and, after generations, they will now have a home on land. His young brother Yi Yangqianxi/ Jackson Yee can’t wait to get into the military.

Tang Guoqiang, playing The Chairman himself living in tasteful elegance in Beijing, is pondering and decides that “If we don’t fight this war, the next generation will have to fight it.”

 

 

 

This all makes a curious comparison with Cease Fire, Owen Crump’s 1953 American 3D shot in battle zone Korean War drama-doc.  where soldiers played themselves. That one puts a similar case for the U.S. position.

Mao commits the People’s Volunteer Army to set up at Changjin Lake in North Korea to repel the invaders, with his son going along - and that’s the last we see of The Great Helmsman.

It’s also the end of Wu Jing’s leave. Horsemen with blazing torches are calling the forces to battle. Our hero is back on a train (another set piece) but this time his young brother is along - stirring moment of the open cattle car door revealing the Great Wall (or a studio model at least) that they are passing at dawn.

The Battle at Lake Changjin - Chen Kaige.

Wu Jing’s unit, with their essential code books and radio transmitters, and the advancing Americans are converging on the Chosin Reservoir. The Chinese have to carry out their mission in the freezing cold, despite not being able to load  all their cotton padded uniforms for the conditions in time. A spy plane having spotted them, the US bomb their bridge and the train and the unit has to disperse through the rocky terrain taking hits from aerial gunning - red splatter kicked up among the grey boulders.

They become involved in one of the film’s set pieces - a battle to destroy a Signal Tower that involves hand to hand fighting and overcoming a tank force. Veteran Lei Jusheng making the heroic drive with the blazing flair bomb is particularly graphic.

The film contrasts the Chinese struggling to eke out frozen potatoes with the Americans having their lavish Thanksgiving banquet, though John F. Cruz’ U.S. General Smith, heading up the Americans on the ground, is under criticism from the Gung Ho Commander of X Force for not hustling the campaign through on the schedule determined in the back rooms. Communist Country films repeatedly make this division between the Brass and the actual fighters - Kurt Maetzig’s 1950 Der Rat der Götter / Council of the Gods.

The Battle at Lake Chanjin stands apart from nearly all of it’s kind in putting forward American characters with plausible English language dialogue effectively delivered, even sparing some dignity and sympathy for General Smith. This doesn’t extend to  James Filbird’s Douglas MacArthur who is shown, in recognisable, corn cob pipe smoking profiles, as a politically ambitious Imperialist.

Needless to say the hard pressed Chinese soldiers overcome even the American’s crack “Polar Bear” troops, inflicting a humiliating defeat, which leads to the eventual U.S. capitulation. A glimpse of ice covered troops frozen in their fighting positions underlines the resolve of the P.V.A.

 

The Battle at Lake Changjing - Blowing stuff up.

The contrast between the Chinese production and the War Films we know is striking. No square bashing, target practice or lecture hall preparation. Yi Yangqianxi’s training consists of hazing by the joking unit members he’s traveling with. The only women glimpsed don’t get to hold up half the sky. They are the hero’s mum and a winning young woman who gives her red scarf to the soldiers being rushed into icy conflict. However the makers provide the impression of having seen (or at least heard about) US films including Sands of Iwo Jima, Three Kings and of course the Rambo movies. Can’t say I’m impressed with their research. They show American troops advancing under flares and motionless when the sky goes dark - the opposite of basic training.

The game here is not praising or condemning the film’s staging and performance, which have been accepted enthusiastically on their home turf. Instead we are supposed to  try to prize out the message content and applaud or damn that in line with pre-existing opinions. There’s already enough of that for anything I might say to be swamped, though I will admit to concern over the fact that such a high proportion of top end Chinese film making is devoted to showing their military triumphs - Operation Red Sea /Hong hai xing dong, 800, the Wolf Warrior films - more so than current material from any other sources we have access to, more so than the bellicose nineteen fifties - The Cruel Sea, Battle Cry etc.

In contrast to the phenomenally popular Wolf Warrior 2 (what happened to number 3?) The Sydney run appears to have been unspectacular, with a dozen or so mainly Asian spectators on the night I saw it.

I can’t help wondering what would happen if this one were shown in seventy years time - assuming the film and it’s audience last that long. Would it look like a piece of flag waving hog wash with unconvincing special effects, the way we see This Man’s Navy today. Of the two, I will admit to enjoying MGM and Wallace Beery more - possibly because it is in a language I speak and a film form I know but also because of the underlying Hollywood know how - clearly recognisable characters, an unconfused plot line with suspense interludes and the union of the beautiful people at the end - dwarfed by giant rubber balloons. 

Barrie Pattison - 2021