The Naked and the Dead (Raoul Walsh, 1958)

[Roger_Thornhill]

I'm currently reading Norman Mailer's behemoth of a book that Walsh's 1958 film is based on, and thus was interested in seeing what he and the writers did with the material. However, it seems to be virtually unavailable in North America and is currently not on the TCM schedule. So, I was wondering if anyone here has seen it and, if so, what were your thoughts on the film? Walsh was a tremendous director in his day but I don't think I've seen anything he directed from the 1950s, unfortunately, which may be because many of his 50s films are unavailable on video or DVD.

[vivahawks]

I saw this a couple of years ago and it was a decent but mostly conventional war film, best and most typical of Walsh in the excellent action sequences and the depiction of the men's physical struggle across terrain (the company's trek across a narrow mountainous pass is the movie's most memorable part). I haven't read the book, but I could sense the movie was pulling its punches when it dealt with some of the plotlines critical of military and macho attitudes. I thought Aldo Ray was excellent as the deranged Sergeant Croft though. Like just about all Walsh, it's worth seeing, but definitely several steps down from the great masterpieces of the 30s and 40s, like most of the 50s work I've seen or read about. (I hold out hope for the unseen A Lion is in the Streets, which I've heard is excellent.)

[Polybius]

I saw this a couple of years ago and it was a decent but mostly conventional war film

That's pretty much the bottom line. The novel is (obviously) far deeper and more intense. When I read it a few years ago I remember thinking that it was deserving of a modern, honest remake (although it's similarities to The Thin Red Line might give it some problems getting past the planning stage.)

[Lamourderer]

I just read the book and started to look for information about this film. I knew it wouldn't be as near as deep and thought provoking as the novel but I was quite disappointed when I saw it was described mostly as an action flick with a quite a different, happier and simpler plot and ending. The book is mainly about waiting, it's narrative drifting it's view point from one of the soldiers to another. There is hardly any "action" at all and it's tone is very cold, pessimistic and ironic. It's themes include corruption, murder, melancholy, death and chaos. None of the characters is described as "good" or "bad". They're just human beings with their own faults thrown in the middle of worthless suffering.

Still, I'd like to actually see the film's version of things, mainly because I liked the novel so much and would like to compare them better than in theory.

Apparently this is getting another film version in 2010, at least according to IMDB. I sure hope it gets a proper treatment this time (I dream of it being five hours long or so, really capturing the dullness and bitterness of the seemingly never ending battle and really getting us in to the characters - not gonna happen).

[Roger_Thornhill]

Thanks everyone for your comments. I guess it's not really worth hunting down if it's just a conventional action war picture, but maybe one day it'll get released on DVD in North America and I can give it a go. Is it available on DVD in any other regions?

[domino harvey]

Watched this via the Warner Archives Blu-ray and found it to be an intermittently-entertaining but sloppy mess. I haven't read Mailer's novel (and based on this adaptation and his films from the Eclipse set, that will likely remain my status til death-- though, as a digression, I was watching Rocky and Bullwinkle the other day and almost spit my drink out when they dropped a Norman Mailer joke, so I thank him for that) but the film gives its feeble cast of c-stringers and never-wases impossible dialogue that no one is able to rise above. The film gives false hope by opening with a hilariously tasteless exercise in mysoginist excess that it never commits to as it gradually softens its focus away from Aldo Ray's psychotic sergeant onto a dull beyond belief power kerfuffle between dozy idealist Cliff Robertson and his commanding officer Raymond Massey. The film's narrative doesn't work if Ray's character isn't the villain, but Walsh shows a craven tendency bordering on sympathy for Ray that denies the audience the pleasure in hating him or the discomfort in enjoying his antics. It's just poor filmmaking. And it's not a lone problem here. Among other infractions, I counted at least two instances of the greener actors here forgetting themselves and looking directly into the camera (not in a distancing way, in a "This should have been caught and reshot" way), an embarrassing misframing of Massey during a key scene that cuts off half his head for no reason, and there are two brief and superfluous flashbacks here, one of which adds literally nothing to characterization or plot beyond the mild amusement of watching a ladykiller host an improbable conga line of women he's simultaneously fucking.

This is my 31st Raoul Walsh film and, while he's made some movies I like, I am by now wholly unconvinced that there is any auteur argument to be made here any more than for, say, a far less lauded workhorse like Henry Hathaway. I think it's also pretty obvious why Walsh has not maintained the kind of lasting modern reputation of many of his lauded contemporaries-- his work is too varied, too uneven, and filled with too few objective highlights to survive a cohesive argument (and it's telling that those who try bring in only a small percentage of his films to make their arguments). Walsh is to directing what this cast of this film is to acting-- he showed up, but was subject to the material at hand and could not rise above it.

[Altair]

In the book's defence, I would say it's Mailer's best in terms of his works of fiction (not necessarily in regards to his journalism). It captures the boredom of war very effectively, as well as focusing in on the pain of living and marching through a jungle environment. There is a very memorable passage of soldiers trying to bring a wounded comrade down a mountain where the novel's searing emphasis on every step, every ulcer, every pain, is hallucinogenic in its realism. I still need to see the Walsh film, even if it sounds exceedingly minor.

[domino harvey]

That plot point does occur, but it occupies only a small portion of screen time and we are told via expository dialogue that the soldiers did it because they “loved” the wounded character (note: said love not depicted on screen)

[Mr Sausage]

I was originally going to write a paragraph on the book and then get to talking about the movie, but my thoughts on the book ballooned so I'll make it a separate post now and write up the movie maybe tomorrow.

I haven't read Mailer's novel (and based on this adaptation and his films from the Eclipse set, that will likely remain my status til death

While I don't blame you, it's actually a readable book! I put off reading it a long time for a similar reason...only instead of Mailer's films, it was his other novels! How you guys talk about the stuff in the Eclipse set is exactly how I feel about the two other novels of his I read, both of which were the worst things I read that year. I tried An American Dream and Why Are We In Vietnam? (a novel despite the title). The former starts with its narrator throwing his wife out a window and then immediately running off to bugger the maid in celebration. It alternates between being boring and ludicrous—and it’s the better of the two! The latter is 200 pages of word salad. Mailer had the bright idea of trying his hand at stream of consciousness, but from the perspective of a crass teenager. Imagine Ulysses if it were written by the village idiot. Unreadable. It also ends with its narrator buggering his friend in the woods on a hunting trip before they’re both off to Vietnam. Mailer had something of a fixation there that is better left unexamined.

But The Naked and the Dead is a good book. It's imperfect and not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's readable. Mailer excels at describing the physical and emotional torments of being a soldier. There are moments of fatigue so profound that you can't believe the men haven't just died on their feet. And the terrors of being shelled or shot at and the attendant physical sensations are convincing. There is a sequence where the men have to haul artillery pieces through the jungle overnight whose precise itemization of each horrific sensation, each bit of physical and mental collapse, becomes a vision of hell on earth, and isn't something I'll forget any time soon. A late hike up a mountain cross-narrated with carrying a soldier through the jungle on a stretcher, are equally impressive for the same reasons. I haven't read a book that gives you such a tangible sense of physical torment since Golding's Pincher Martin.

Mailer is also good at the tedium and unstructured nature of war. There is no narrative or main character; there is just a set of characters, most in the same platoon, whose perspectives we move between at random. No overall sense of the structure of war emerges. The book is a series of moments as experienced by various people in the chain of command, with most of the action just characters interacting with each other as they wait around for something to happen. Nobody knows what's happening in anyone else's head, nobody has a handle on the battle as a whole, everyone's caught up in their own petty needs and desires, their own tiny blinkered views of the world, as this war happens around them. It's a gaggle of selfish, blinkered assholes caught up in a meaningless chaos.

So its vision of war is strong. It's vision of humanity, tho', is...eh. Gore Vidal in his review of Mailer's Advertisements For Myself called Mailer's war book a fake full of characters ripped right out of the novels they both had been reading at the time, and it's hard not to disagree. For as persuasive as Mailer is on the sensation of being in war, he has a hard time creating persuasive or interesting characters. You have the psycho squad leader, the horny yokel, a childlike Mexican (who speaks in a broken English that shows only Mailer's lack of interest in how non-native speakers actually talk), a couple weak and resentful Jews, the general who's a "latent homosexual" (Mailer's words from Town Bloody Hall) and fixating, Billy Budd style, on a young Lieutenant. They feel out of the fiction of the era. And they're no fun to be around. They are all, to a man, total assholes, just self-absorbed, quarrelsome, ucommunicative, prickly little fucks. There's a point there, probably, about what war does to a man, but it's not a point that requires 720 pages of people being shitty to each other to make. It gets wearisome to read the same kind of character interactions over and over at this length. And then there's the misogyny. Every character here hates women and treats them miserably. They talk endlessly about women as either sex objects or pains in the ass (and only seem to think of them as human after the women have died). There are visions of each character's home life, clunkily labled 'Time Machine' whenever they come up, each one a kind of Theodore Dreiser/John Dos Passos attempt to relate the man to his times. And in each we get a vision of the men's deplorable treatment of women (none of them are happy to be doing anything with a women outside of sex, and even then...) while the women themselves are only ever whores, schrews, scolds, ice queens, or whiny victims. This may well be a realistic portrait of the average enlisted man's vision of the opposite sex in the 40s, but the endless, unrelieved misogyny wears you down.

Mailer plainly wants this to be War and Peace, so the vision is not only panoramic, but full of theorizing on the nature of war and society and depictions of the political and social issues of the time. Again, for as good as Mailer can be on the nature of exhaustion and fear, he's feeble when it comes to the more essay-style sections. At least much of the socio-political theorizing is put in the mouth of the General, so you're under no obligation to take it seriously. But the Time Machine sections suffer from Mailer's stock characterizations. The men's misogyny comes across more forcefully than their interactions with the social and political forces of their day. It's here you feel Mailer trying to brute force his way into Great Novel territory. Mailer does have a Dreiser talent for American realism, but these Time Machine sections haven't much life to them, seem dutiful and pulled off through sheer concentrated craft rather than artistry.

A very imperfect novel, and yet one full of talent and ability whose lasting impression, ultimately, comes from its strengths. Its unconvincing characters and misogyny fades into the background while stuff like its treks through the jungle, its terrifying battles, its sense of the landscape as a physical force bearing down on you, loom largest in the mind. I see why later satirical novels like Catch 22 and Gravity's Rainbow have eclipsed Mailer's work in the public's eye, but I also see what about this novel so captivated my grandparent's generation. It's a striking example of war as hell whose relentless physicality overgoes even antiwar works from the prior era like All Quiet on the Western Front and Storm of Steel, and whose vision of the average soldier as a crabby rotten shithead working more on self-interest, exhaustion, fear, and compliance than heroism, goodness, or duty has an honesty to it, even if the characters as individuals seem lifted more from fiction than life.

If this is an era of American history you are at all interested in, you should give this one a read, if for no other reason than it formed part of the mental architecture of a whole generation.

[Mr Sausage]

As for the movie, there’s much less to say. It’s limp and uninvolving. It reproduces a lot from the book, but indifferently or haphazardly. Why be slavish in this way when the book is nothing but disconnected moments and sequences you can pick and choose from, or just ignore and make your own analogous scenes? So we have stuff like the flowers and the cigarette, which work in the book since they gain weight from the psychological effects the book analyzes at length. Absent that psychologizing, there’s no dramatic heft to such petty moments. Or there’s Minetta’s malingering, which forms a large section of the second part of the book, but in the movie is dispensed with as soon as it happens. Same with Gallagher’s wife dying. Why even bother? The movie even feels obligated to try the novel’s Time Machine sections, but can’t commit to more than two of them, so they’re superfluous instead of structural, another puzzling detail in a movie full of them. When the movie does invent something, it’s goofy stuff like a guy dying from a snakebite as tho’ he’d chugged a litre of cyanide. And when it leaves things out, it’s the best parts, like carrying the guns through the jungle for long agonizing hours, or the hornet’s nest. It’s such a dirty, uncomfortable book, and such a clean, orderly movie! The thing needed a force and immediacy that Raoul Walsh is uninterested in capturing. I get the feeling Walsh was not the director for this one; he’s too fond of clarity and order. He’s forever photographing groups of men standing in well-lit clearings, so the film feels like people standing next to a jungle rather than struggling through it. Plus Panama really doesn’t look like a South Pacific island. Given the novel has no narrative thrust and ends with a pointed anti-climax, it’s important for a movie version to do its own thing, not just give the audience a bunch of scenes they kinda remember. As it is, Walsh has made a film with little physicality, less psychology, and no momentum let alone story (plus a dollop of simplistic moralizing). A movie made without conviction.

[JamesF]

When Norman Mailer Met Charles Laughton