What about the stupid Greek guy subplot?

0 stars

The character of "Bell" is an extremely important person in Jones' work, and the concepts he is thinking about was addressed in his work, "WWII," published in the 1970s.

The character was a prewar lieutenant who resigned his commission because his marriage was collapsing.  He gets drafted anyway.  He shows up on Guadalcanal worrying about his wife, who he figures is cheating on him, (she is) and will divorce him (she trys to) everyone looks at him funny, as he is "odd man out" as a former LT who doesn't really care whether he gets his rank back.

Partly through the battle, he realizes he is basically a dead man, there is no way he is getting home to his wife, so there is no point in him worrying about what she is doing as he wont ever be alive to worry about it.

"At some unspecified moment between this time yesterday and this time today the unsought realization had come to Bell that statistically, mathematically, arithmetically, any way you wanted to count it, he John Bell could not possibly live through this war. He could not possibly go home to his wife Marty Bell. So it did not really make any difference what Marty did, whether she stepped out on him or not, because he would not be there to accuse her....the emotion which this revelation created in Bell was not one of sacrifice, resignation, acceptance, and peace. Instead, it was an irritating, chaffing emotion of helpless frustration which made him want to crawl around rubbing his flanks and back against rocks to ease the itch."

This is not a hippy dippy Terrence Malick thought.  And it really isnt applicable that much to soldiers nowadays.  It was a problem the GIs had to face going into WWII where they would be gone for years and unwounded survival was near zero, and rifle companies could take 300% casualties in a year.  In the 60s and 70s many people had forget the GIs in the infantry ever felt that way.

Soldiers instinctively figured this out; you saw all your buddies get killed and you did the math.  Hollywood didn't really care, except with that famous monologue by the Richard Speirs character in BOB:





Jones wrote about this alot, to get people to understand what the line doggies wouldn't say about themselves:

This is from 1975:
"Every combat soldier, if he follows far enough along the path that began with his induction, must, I think, be led inexorably to that awareness. He must make a compact with Fate that he is lost....He knows and accepts beforehand that he's dead, but he may be walking around for awhile...the great majority of men don't want to accept it.  They can accept it though, and do accept it, if their outfit keeps going back up there long enough.

This is a hard philosophy. But then the soldier's profession is a hard profession, in wartime...it has its excitements and compensations. One of them is that, since you have none yourself, you are relieved of any responsibility for a future. And everything tastes better.

Most men in war are never required to pay up in full on the contract for the life that the state has loaned them.  For every combat soldier there are about fifteen or twenty required to maintain and service him who are never in much danger, if any.  But everybody pays interest on the loan, and the closer to the front he gets the higher the interest rate.

If he survives at all, it can take him a long time to get over the fact he isn't going to have to pay."

Jones wrote about the "evolution of the soldier" and the de-evolution of the soldier" , in that "As the old combat numbness disappeared, and the frozen feet of the soul began to thaw, the pain of the cure became evident." He asks, "How did you come back from counting yourself as dead?"  which is a question Mallick was not interested in, at all. Bell was learning to count himself as lost, and it hurt, and Jones wanted a 1960s audience to get that.  Because the 40 year old men wandering around back then weren't good at articulating that.  And what do you about it?  

1. Jones spent a lot of time trying to explain to the reader that a lot of the line doggies had to come to hard realizations, and many didn't come all the way back when the war ended. In the 50s to 70s that wasn't widely acknowledged. "Bell" was a character that basically was coming to the realization of what "Speirs" articulated in BoB, but he had the personal hangups of a civilian that he had to cut bait on.  Jones doesn't show Bell dying, so its hard to say what he finally evolves into, or perhaps he has to come back from the dead in 1945.  

2. What Mallick saw in "Bell" is debatable but it came out garbled, broken and distorted.

This

One of the few movies I think are perfect and definitely my favorite.

Quite possibly the only book/film combination where reading the book takes less time...

Worded better than I could have.
As long as you don't take the movie as canon, and don't have ADD, it wasn't that bad.

Jay

Edit out some of the off story wandering cinematography of random bugs and leaves and some blatant mistakes like the modern patrol ship it was a good movie with good combat action.

Overall I liked it and it is a better war movie than SPR which turned into a steaming pile of shit after beach opening scenes.

Excellent post.

HBO producers did something quite similar with Captain America's character. I can't recall if the actual book it's based on or if Fick's book mentioned this conversation (or if it was fictional):

06:15

The practical effects in that video look very similar to those in Dien Bien Phu, which was an excellent film (although I don't think the siege can be fully done justice short of turning it into a mini-series; in terms of style, Schoendoerffer was going for a high degree of realism, and it helped in that regard that he was a veteran of the siege and could shoot in the same region of Vietnam).

I don't remember much about The Thin Red Line.  I was literally a kid when I saw it.  I certainly wouldn't have understood any symbolism nor appreciated any artistic qualities it may have had at that age.

I do appreciate a well-done artistic movie.  Not sure how well done this one is (most of the comments here seem to be from the sorts who wouldn't appreciate even an outstanding film of this type).  Might be worth a watch now that I'm older if I don't have to pay for it and have the time.  The cinematography in the clips shown in the video seems excellent, and the effects looked good in them, as mentioned earlier.  If that was the score playing in the background, then I got a good impression of that as well.  It may well be crap, but it at least seems like it might not be such.  Probably no way for me to really know without watching it.  Some people do in fact overdo the artistic aspect to the point that it becomes detrimental to the film, and this certainly may be one of those.  But, again, no way for me to be sure without watching it first.

If its any consolation, you'd hate the book, too.  There's gay sex in the book.

Don't anyone dare to call this a war movie.

Pretentious shite.

The technical advising was really spot on.   They got the uniforms and equipment down pretty damn good.  Most of the combat scenes were well done.  Acting was top notch in most cases.

The whole story line sucked ass.

Not really.  The movie made infantry company commanders look like they were bystanders to an undisciplined, leaderless mob in actions on contact.  

Were mortars, LMGs, and other weapons organic to a rifle company depicted as they would have been employed?  Not at all.

An infantry platoon, company, and / or battalion is much more integrated and interactive than suggested in the plot.  The story of one simply cannot be told without the other.  

I too enjoy the movie, but it is fundamentally flawed in many ways.

As did I.  Only two movies have ever sent me out the door - this one and Bad Lieutenant.

The duality of man??

Whose side are you on?

Worst war movie ever fucking made.

anybody who says they liked it or it was a good film is an art fag trying to impress  somebody.

But that's just my opinion.

The movie really fucking sucked.

ETA,. If I had to choose to watch this movie one More Time, or every episode of sex in the City including all of the movies I still would not watch this fucking movie again.

Neat pic from " Our Army at War " book.

I read the book twice over the years before the film was made.  A little voice told me not to expect much, although the book was good.  The author did an interview years before the film, pointing out really stupid things that actually happened and were in the book.  The one that stuck in my mind was new troops taking hand grenades off their belts and leaving them lay.  There was a fear that the pins might accidentally get pulled while crawling under fire.

Athropologist like it.  I'm not an anthropologist.

What really ruined it for me was when they were walking the single track and passed the little bushman type guy.


He didn't even try to bum a smoke.

The bright yellow grenades went away very quickly.  They went to the thin yellow stripe around the top.

Like this




Yellow grenades were in the system for years from yellow painted stocks made at the beginning of the war.  Most were over painted OD somewhere during the supply train or even by field soldiers.

However, you can still see a few yellow grenades pop up in photos all the way until D-Day.

Terrible

To me, its a good movie hampered by two things.

1.  Its director.  You can feel his smarminess throughout the movie.  You can sense his ego as well, throughout the movie.  It feels like he is telling you "This is my war.  And this is art.  And this is how my soldiers act in it."

2.  Its editor.  I mean its garbage.  Its uneven, choppy, and entirely too long.  Knock 45 minutes off of it, and I feel like more people would like it.  But you can tell they were working at the behest of the director.  I feel like the director was trying to make a 75/25 art/war movie, and the production company called it a war movie because of SPR.