Cinema: To Fight & Die Quietly

Merrill's Marauders is much quieter than the usual war picture. Rifle fire has the deceptively dull sound of rifle fire. Plans are made in everyday voices, neither out of breath with excitement nor too studiously underkeyed. Director Samuel Fuller, who served in the infantry during World War II, seems determined to make the point that men at war—particularly when their war is one of close-in jungle combat unsupported by artillery—fight and die quietly.

The picture tells the story of the 3,000 volunteers who crossed Japanese lines in Burma in 1944 and spent five months clearing the enemy out of 5,000 square miles of territory. There are no subplots, and no Ava Gardners miraculously rising out of the rice paddies. There is no false construction toward some climactic victory. It is just a steady series of small victories and long marches, constant death, pervading disease—malaria, typhus, amoebic dysentery, psychoneurosis—and the ultimate wonder that anyone survived at all.

As every moviegoer knows, Gregory Peck and David Niven blew up the guns of Navarone, and Alec Guinness destroyed the bridge on the Kwai. But in this picture, the late Jeff Chandler effaces himself so deftly that his star billing fades, and what is left is a memorable portrait of the late General Frank Merrill, carefully sketched from his long-stemmed apple-bowl pipe all the way in to the heart that survived a thrombosis during the campaign and the spirit that was beyond the reach of disease or the enemy.

Unwritten rule said three months behind Japanese lines was the most a man could stand. The actual Marauders eventually fell apart, demoralized. The picture does not concern itself with the politics of the historical incident: only after a high-level investigation were the Marauders given their unit citation and their place among the great heroes of military history. Analyzing nothing, the film makes no point except that a godless Book of Job was written in Burma 18 years ago.