In praising the greatness of Combat!, I don’t believe that it’s possible to be guilty of hyperbole.
Seven years ago, I bought my chief of research the complete DVDs of Combat!, all 152 episodes.
(The linked edition, which I bought, is much more expensive than the other editions, which run at $90 and $100, respectively. However, the quality was wonderful. Note that Amazon runs the same customer reviews for all three editions, so the prospective customer has no idea which edition a reviewer is discussing.)
He watched every episode at least once. I watched maybe 30, but every episode was a masterpiece, compared to most TV dramas, then and now. Of special note were “The Volunteer,” the two-parter “The Long Way Home,” guest starring Richard Basehart (Part II), “Cat and Mouse,” “Hills are for Heroes,”… aw, heck, the general standard was Olympian.
This episode revolves around a “spoiled priest,” a term I’d never heard before. Jeffrey Hunter, who had been a big Hollywood star, plays a tank sergeant, Sgt. Dane, who is in a perpetual state of rage. He’s mad at God Himself.
It seems that Sgt. Dane was thrown out of a Catholic seminary, where he was studying to become a priest.
As far as he’s concerned, his life is over.
But there’s still a war to win.
The men of King Company encounter Sgt. Dane as they enter a deserted, French town.
In the course of this episode, one will hear four languages spoken: English, German, French and Latin. As usual on Combat!, there are no subtitles and no dubbing. And it was never merely to show off.
Youtube commenter 58jimmie: “I really wish they’d put subtitles for the languages other than english.”
N.S.: Except that that would kill the experience. It’s supposed to be strange, foreign, and jarring. You want to feel like you’re at home.
Imagine that? We won the biggest war in the history of the world without interpreters at our boys’ beck and call.
Combat! was created by Master Sergeant Robert Pirosh, U.S. Army (1910-1989), one of the “battered bastards of Bastogne,” who had endured the German siege in the eponymous, Belgian town during the Battle of the Bulge. Thanks to Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the word was “Nuts!”
Before the war, Pirosh had been a successful screenwriter of Hollywood comedies, including for the Marx Brothers. He came out of the war driven to pay tribute to the American infantryman.
In 1949, he wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for “Wild Bill” Wellman’s Bastogne masterpiece, Battleground. In 1951, Pirosh was nominated for another Oscar for his script for Go for Broke! (which he also directed), about the U.S. 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Nisei (Japanese) unit that was the most decorated of the war.
In 1962, it looked like Pirosh’a career would hit a new peak. He created Combat!, and wrote, directed, and produced another classic infantry movie, Hell is for Heroes.
If you check Pirosh’s credits, you’ll only see that he wrote Hell. That’s because the cast included the King of Cruel, aka Steve McQueen.
When the picture was over 90% finished, McQueen succeeded at driving Pirosh to distraction. Under the old studio system, some suits from the studio would have read McQueen the riot act, or fired him, and re-shot his scenes with a different actor.
Pirosh quit the shoot, the studio brought in Don Siegel to finish it, and it gave Siegel the sole credit for directing it. And although Pirosh continued selling TV scripts until the late 1970s, that was it for him as a producer and director.
Meanwhile, the producer that bought Combat!, credited Pirosh and paid him for his idea, but did not keep him on, beyond having him make the first episode, about D-Day, which the producer pushed back to the 11th episode, told as a flashback.
One year later, when John Sturges, an established producer and director, was making The Great Escape, McQueen did it again. He took the whole production hostage, demanding a bigger role.
Sturges tried to hang tough, but eventually, thinking of the example of Pirosh, he too surrendered.
McQueen had supposedly been a Marine, but he acted like a Section 8. In Hollywood’s Golden Age, they would’ve simply run him out of town.
Combat! S.1 Ep.3: “Lost Sheep, Lost Shepherd” (1962)
Episode written by Robert Hardy Andrews and directed by Burt Kennedy, with Rick Jason, Vic Morrow, Jeffrey Hunter, Martin Brandt, Steven Rogers, Dick Peabody, Joby Baker, Tony Mordente, Rex Holman, Hans Difflipp. Music by Leonard Rosenman. Original Air Date: 16 October 1962.
No comments:
Post a Comment