Manny Farber's best films of 1951, #2: "Fixed Bayonets!," directed by Samuel Fuller

For context, see here. 

Farber: "Sam Fuller's jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid—the best war movie since Bataan. I wouldn't mind seeing it seven times."

 

Tay Garnett's Bataan, with Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Thomas Mitchell and Lloyd Nolan, was all the way back in '43. Farber was pretty picky about his war movies—his praise for They Were Expendable, for instance, was measured, and fleeting—but there's no denying that this one, Fuller's second Korean foray after the triumph of The Steel Helmet, is something pretty special.

It's a variant of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, to be sure, but also of The Red Badge of Courage. Richard Basehart's Corporal Denno is a self-hating, self doubting soldier in what seems to him the worst position imaginable. That is, he may have to assume leadership duties at any minute. Under normal circumstances this wouldn't seem entirely likely, as there are three, count 'em three, officers above him. Except his platoon's been picked for a rear-guard action in order to fool the enemy that their division isn't backing out but quick. Talk about expendable. "In this case it's 48 men—unlucky men, maybe—giving 15,000 men a break," notes a Colonel Taylor. Gee, thanks for the testimonial.

As the other men take consolation in every form of tobacco imaginable—cigarette, pipe, cigar, chewing—and one hoards some dry socks that he hopes his band of brothers won't find out about. Denno frets and sweats and can't even bring himself to take down a sitting duck of a Chinese soldier. In the meantime his superior officers fall, not quite like dominoes, but just as inexorably.

 

Unlike Marquis' Little Big Horn, which mostly eschewed close-ups, this picture is full of them, medium close-ups for the most part. Fuller loves the looks of his foot soldiers, the "dogfaces"—and in particular he loves a dog face, that of Gene Evans' Sergeant Rock, who's the final officer between Denno and leadership, and who delights in practically taunting Denno about it. I'd love to read an interpretation of this picture positing Rock as its Christ figure, but I'm not about to write one. 

 

Evans, so fantastic in The Steel Helmet, is maybe even better here—gruff, funny, convincingly philosophical. There's a mass foot-rubbing bit of business in the cave where the soldier's take shelter that kind of undercuts the machismo of the character, which, despite the film's endgame celebration of battlefield ingenuity, is part of the whole point. "The primary motive for all the action..." Fuller insists in his autobiography, A Third Face, "is survival, not heroism. I wanted to underscore the futility of battle and the tragic human waste."

The Steel Helmet's success got Fuller on Fox head Daryl Zanuck's good side, and he made the picture under relatively cozy circumstances. "We shot the movie in twenty days, twice as much time as I'd ever had on a movie set." And a pretty impressive set it was. For much of the film the dogfaces are camped in a cave at the side of what's practically a cliff-face, a snow covered one at that. There's a spectacular single take in which a soldier scurries down from the cave to bayonet a Chinese soldier and scurries back up again, beautifully fluid camerawork from Lucien Ballard. Still, like most Fuller movies, this is a picture where more is derived from less, as in the furious fast-cutting montages of mortar fire. 

Fixed Bayonets! is often cited as James Dean's first film appearance, and the ever-great storyteller Fuller commemorates it thusly in A Third Face: "To convey the isolation in Fixed Bayonets!, a soldier yells out 'Who goes there?' and all he hears is his own voice echoing over and over. The actor we cast for that part was a young, sensitive kid in his first movie, James Dean. Dean had just come out to Hollywood to find work after having studied at the Actor's Studio. I liked his face and gave him a crack. I hoped it would bring him luck."

Cue "print the legend" observations and such. If you go looking for Dean going by Fuller's description, you won't quite find him. His appearance comes very close to the end of the picture, as the rear guard pulls out, their mission accomplished, in search of their comrades. They get to the river that had been designated as a rendezvous point. Across the river, other American soldiers stand guard. One of them hears something, and rushes to notify his commander. That's Dean. Here he is, rushing. 

 

Hell, I think that's Dean, don't you? In any event, he reaches his commander, and it's he who shouts "Who's out there?" to be greeted with, not an echo, but words he didn't necessarily expect to hear: "The rear guard."

FIxed Bayonets! is out in a very good-looking DVD from Fox Home Entertainment. It's certainly put me in the mood for more Fuller. Good for us that Columbia's long-awaited Fuller collection is streeting soon. 

Comments

[Lou Lumenick]

Dean can be clearly seen as a young pressman conversing with Humphrey Bogart -- you can't hear what they're saying because the presses are roaring -- in Richard Brooks' Deadline USA, released eight months before Fixed Bayonets.

[Cadavra]

Thanks, Glenn. As many times as I've seen BAYONETS, I've never been able to spot him, even in 35mm.