MERRILL'S MARAUDERS (1962) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Samuel Fuller
Jeff Chandler, Ty Hardin, Peter Brown,
Will Hutchins, Andrew Duggan, Claude Akins,
John Hoyt, Charles Briggs, Pancho Magalona
An old-fashioned, World-War-Two combat movie about an American volunteer force slugging its way through the mountains and jungles of Burma to take on the Japanese. Sam Fuller knew something about combat, but he also knew that a movie was a movie, and one thing you notice in this is that when guys die (and a lot of them do), they do it in the same graceful, dramatic, stylized way that we did as kids playing soldier in the back yard. I could swear there's even one guy who goes into his death spiral before the grenade that kills him goes off. Not many of the actual Marauders survived the Burma campaign, but they did stop the Japanese from getting to India. There's a whole other movie waiting to be made about whether the death toll - on both sides - was worth it.
