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.