The Red Badge of Courage

It was like flicking through the channels and finding a Seinfeld episode you haven't seen. It is a strange and glorious sensation, as though an alien had dropped a masterpiece out of the sky with a note attached: anything you can do, we can do better.

Clocking in at 70 minutes, "The Red Badge of Courage" may just be John Huston's masterpiece. It is certainly his most stylish film, flow reminiscent of Eisenstein, camera distinctly Welles-ian. It's Kubrick before Kubrick, "The Thin Red Line" before Malick was toilet trained. Maybe I've been hanging around the wrong cinephiles, but when John Huston's name comes up, the titles "The Maltese Falcon," "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and "The African Queen" are not normally accompanied by "The Red Badge of Courage." In a just world, this film should be recognized amongst the finest Civil War recreations of all time.

Knowing that its star, Audie Murphy, is the most decorated GI in American history adds an extraordinary level of intensity and meaning to each and every scene. He is in virtually every shot, yet playing an unnamed character, Murphy brings an eerie, uncanny knowledge that one soldier in a war is but a drop of rain in the ocean. He experiences virtually every emotion humanity is privy to in the space of a single day, and it is Huston's great achievement that the viewer barely notices.

None of the characters are given a name, and in fact when finally a General is named, everyone resents him. "He's getting credit for this battle?" complains one of the surviving soldiers. "Had I known that I never would have fought." It doesn't matter that we've never seen or heard of this General previously--all that matters is that he is one man. Murphy himself clearly felt that honouring one man for an armies work was an absurd notion--upon burial in Arlington cemetary he made it known that his gravestone would be left plain, unadorned with the normal decorations for a soldier of his stature.

Huston's high style results in hightened realism. The charging rebs emerging like ghosts from clouds of dust are every bit as stirring as Kurasawa's samaurai floating through forests or Spielberg's shower of bullets on Omaha Beach. There are moments in Huston's other films (the fist-fight in the bar in the opening scenes of "Sierra Madre," for example) which suggest this type of high-art vision, but to see an entire film completed in this manner is the stuff of cinema's great masters. It is the stuff of aliens.

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