By David in TN
Tuesday, October 8, 2019 at 7:01:00 P.M. EDT
TCM is showing The Red Badge of Courage (1951) on Wednesday Night, October 9 at 8 p.m. ET, “Prime Time.” Audie Murphy stars in his best performance, directed by John Huston.
This version is only 69 minutes long, supposedly heavily cut, but it holds together and seems to have everything in it.
Bill Mauldin, the famous cartoonist, plays the Murphy character’s friend. In one scene, Huston had to rewrite Stephen Crane. The man who killed hundreds of German soldiers couldn’t bring himself to say to a “rear echelon ink-slinger” that he was afraid and ran away. Huston fixed it so both said they were scared.
N.S.: Years ago, I used to hear (probably from Welles’ himself) that Orson Welles’ follow-up picture to Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), was “even better” than Kane, but that shadowy figures at RKO had butchered it, in order to cut the arrogant, impetuous Welles down to size.
When I saw Ambersons once, late at night, I was underwhelmed. Still, that was supposedly RKO’s fault.
Then I started hearing a similar story about The Red Badge of Courage (1951): Butchered, ruined, etc. But then I saw it, and whatever MGM did to it, it remained a masterpiece. A minor masterpiece, but a masterpiece, nonetheless.
One scene after another had the stuff of greatness about it.
I recently saw an old video interview of Robert Wise, who cut Kane, at Youtube. He said that Welles had it in him to accomplish anything, but that he was lazy.
The problem wasn’t RKO; it was Welles.
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2 comments:
I had thought Stephan Crane had actually served in the American Civil War. He had not but those veterans that had thought the book was accurate in almost a total manner.
TCM is showing John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951) on Wednesday, December 30, at 3:30 pm ET. This starred Audie Murphy in his best performance.
In 1946-47, Audie Murphy studied at the Actor's Studio. From the 2004 book, The Films of Audie Murphy, by Bob Larkins and Boyd Magers, Murphy said of his time there: "Even though the school was subsidized by the government--there were a lot of leftists and Commie lovers in it. Dore Schary called and invited me to his home to run for Congress. He said he would see to it I was elected. I looked around the room at the bunch there and said, 'Hell, I can't even make a living. Why would I want to run for Congress?' When I said no--that ended the discussion--I didn't stay more than five minutes."
The Hollywood Left would have liked to recruit Audie Murphy, but failed. Murphy's most recent biographer, Baylor University's David A. Smith, wrote: "Murphy was a man of neither the ideological left nor the right, but a patriot. In 1948, for example, he spoke against communist infiltration of veterans' organizations. hat year he also endorsed Douglas MacArthur for President. If he merited any political label, it was probably conservative Southern Democrat."
Smith also wrote that "Though he disapproved of the leftward turn of the Democratic Party, he supported its candidates through the 1968 presidential campaign, where he endorsed Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon."
Smith doesn't provide a source for the above but it seems accurate.
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