John Ford’s They were Expendable (1945)

[“Indispensable: The Book (1942), Movie (1945), and Back Story to They were Expendable”; and

“They were Expendable: The Book, Part II.”]

The Movie

Whereas a book is a torrent of words (in some cases with illustrations), a talkie is based on images and sounds.

John Ford, who had served most of the war in the Pacific Theater of Operations, making documentary films, began making this picture during the last days of the war, and finished it shortly after the Japanese surrender.

The picture starred an actual P.T. boat commander, Lt. Commander Robert Montgomery (1904-1981), who had fought the Japs in the Pacific Theater of Operations, and who then piloted a landing craft against the Nazis in the European Theater of Operations on D-Day.

The second banana, billed right under Montgomery, was John Wayne, who had not served.

The opening credits listed every war veteran and his rank:

Second Units Directed by
JAMES C. HAVENS
Captain U.S.M.C.R.

Director of Photography
JOSEPH H. AUGUST, A.S.C.
Lt. Cmdr. U.S.N.R.

Screen Play by
Frank Wead
Comdr. U.S.N. (Ret)

Directed by
John Ford
Captain U.S.N.R.

The opening music is a brassy medley of patriotic music: a little Sousa, a little “Let Freedom Ring,” a little “Anchors Aweigh,” all packaged with some original sounds, courtesy of Herbert Stothart, the Oscar-winning composer of The Wizard of Oz (1939), and MGM’s longtime music director.

“To the end of the end of the world we’ll go,
And to the end of the end of the fight you’ll know,
That we’re the men that are sending them down below,
Sentries of the Navy.

“And to the end of the end of your days at sea,
You’ll find us fighting for right and for liberty....
Anchors Aweigh”

Now Herb Stothart’s music becomes somber, with swirling strings suggesting the ocean’s waves, and we are treated to words from General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (five stars), or his ghostwriter, who had a touch of the poet.

“Today the guns are silent. A great victory has been won…

“I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way.”

We will be treated to countless variations of Stothart’s music, which will serve as the theme, the leitmotif, of the boats and of battle.

Manila Bay

In the Year of Our Lord

Nineteen hundred and Forty-One

(“In the Year of Our Lord” on the screen; imagine that? MGM, Hollywood’s biggest studio, was run by an immigrant Jew, L.B. Mayer, but L.B., who was born in today’s Ukraine and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, was a Robert Taft conservative who, like the other studio chiefs, Jew and gentile alike, loved America.)

In the opening scene, to Herb Stothart’s music and Douglas MacArthur’s words, the men manning the six PT boats of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron 3 are giving a pre-Pearl Harbor demonstration of the Navy’s first PT boats for the brass.

The brass didn’t believe in those fast, lightweight, 70’ x 20’ plywood boats, lacking all armor, but each with three Packard motors, two .50 caliber machine guns and four torpedoes. However, once the Japs attacked, they had to rely on them. When the Germans started World War II, they called their furious strikes against Poland, Norway, Belgium, Holland and France a "Blitzkrieg"--"lightning war." However, if anything the Japanese opening of the Pacific War was even more lightning-like.

The PT boats did not disappoint—they and their men were expended, slowing down the Japs, and conveying the escaping MacArthur to Australia, who swore, “I shall return,” and who made good on his oath.

The picture uses four leitmotifs: Herb Stothart’s theme of the boats and battle; Sandy Dayviss’ theme, Victor Schertzinger’s “the Marcheta”; Dad Knowland’s (real name, Dad Cleeland) theme, “Red River Valley”; and MacArthur’s theme, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Jack Ford (1894-1973) was unable to make use of any actual PT boats from the period. The ones the Japs didn’t sink, our boys had to destroy, so that they wouldn’t fall into the Japs’ hands. But he was given some plywood 80-footers, which filled the bill.

Screenwriter Frank “Spig” Wead (1895-1947), a naval aviation pioneer, who had walked away from death-defying airplane crashes without a scratch, only to break his neck in a fluke household accident, became a “friend” of John Ford’s (friendships with the old man required scare quotes and asterisks), and an accomplished screenwriter. However, Wead went “Hollywood.” (There was also uncredited work on the script by Norman Corwin, George Froeschel, and Jan Lustig.)

Thus, Wead concocted any number of dramatic contrivances not in the book, while eliminating, reducing, or changing much that was in it. (Note that Wead changed John D. Bulkeley’s name to John Brickley; he was played by Robert Montgomery. Robert B. Kelly’s name was changed to “Rusty” Ryan; he was played by John Wayne. And “Peggy’s” name was changed to Sandy Dayviss; she was played by Donna Reed. Somewhere, I read that the Navy did not permit servicemen to be depicted in pictures under their own names.)

Thus, Wead conjures up a conflict not in the book between Montgomery and Wayne’s characters, whereby Kelly/Ryan is a glory hound more concerned with his own career than with serving.

Right after the Navy brass leaves the maneuvers, the following exchange takes place.

Lt. j.g. “Rusty” Ryan [As they watch the brass drive away]: “Wonderful, the way people believe in those high-powered canoes of yours.

Lt. John Brickley: “Don’t you believe in them, Rusty?

Lt. “Rusty” Ryan: “And I let you sell me that stuff about a command of my own.

Lt. John Brickley: “You’re skipper of the 34 boat, aren’t you?

Lt. j.g. “Rusty” Ryan: “I used to skipper a cake of soap in the bathtub, too.”

[He walks off.]

Brickley then walks over to his boat, the 41, and looks at it lovingly, like a father gazing at his new-born child.

However, Wead and Ford create a bookend scene, weeks later, when a Jap dive bomber destroys Ryan’s 34 boat, while he’s standing on a beach 20 feet away. He takes off his cap, and grimaces, as if he were watching a loved one die.

Also, while in the book (i.e., in reality), Lt. Robert B. Kelly had at one point gone missing in action, been given up for dead, and a Catholic priest had held a funeral service for him and another man, in the picture, it is Kelly who speaks at the funeral for two men, reading a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, “Requiem.”

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

The battle scenes, all ably photographed by second unit director, James C. Havens, are stirring, but they are not the most moving scenes in the picture.

Ford has been likened to a painter, which should hardly be surprising for a great movie director. However, no director had a better grasp of the role of music, and gave more exquisite care to its use. The viewer may think he is moved to tears by what he sees, but it is typically the accompanying music that wrings those tears from him.

Three exhausted nurses in oversized uniforms (“all uglied up in those potato bags”) are shot from behind, wearily leaving the operating room, on a beautifully shiny cement floor.

When, with the Japs approaching, Ryan offers to escort “Dad” Knowland (real name, “Dad” Cleeland; played by professional rustic, Russell Simpson) away from his shipyard, he refuses, saying, “I worked forty years for this, son. If I leave it, they’ll have to carry me out,” and stoically sits down on the wooden steps of his house, a jug of whiskey by his side, and a rifle across his knees.

Ford has “Red River Valley,” from circa 1831, play in the background.

Chords of mystic memory.

(According to the theory, a leitmotif provides a memory within a picture of what transpired earlier in it, but this is a John Ford picture we’re talking about.)

While in the book, Robert Kelly and Peggy got to constantly spend time together for three months, Ford has them see very little of each other in the picture. And yet, she looms large. How do you do that? You do it with music.

Ford used Victor Schertzinger’s slow, haunting, 1913 waltz, “Marcheta: A Love Song of Old Mexico” as Peggy’s leitmotif.

The nurses throw a party, to which Peggy invites Ryan. Ford and Wead contrive a conflict before the party, in which Ryan haughtily lectures Peggy, “I don’t dance, and I don’t have time to learn!”

But he does show up at the party. And they dance on a crowded floor, to Schertzinger’s waltz. He’s an officer and a gentleman; of course, he can dance! And this is when they fall in love.

After dancing, Peggy and Kelly make small-talk about their respective backgrounds, sitting alone on a hammock in a secluded area at the party, with “Marcheta” playing softly in the background—and the earlier arrogant Kelly can only manage a goofy grin.

(In a nice touch, Ford had one of his screenwriters insert among the small talk that Sandy is from Iowa. Donna Reed actually was an Iowa farm girl, born and bred. Wead has Rusty Ryan be from upstate New York. In reality, Kelly and Bulkeley were both from New York City.)

Except for the dance scene, during every scene Sandy appears in, whether she’s coming to a special dinner the officers throw for her, or talking to Ryan on a field telephone, the “Marcheta” plays in the background. Even when she’s not in the scene, but Ryan is talking about her, or even just thinking about her, we hear the “Marcheta.”

The typical viewer is only consciously aware of the Schertzinger waltz twice—when the future lovers dance, and in a scene in which the music is playing on the radio, is interrupted for the alert that Bataan, where Peggy is stationed with 36,000 American soldiers, has just fallen to a force of 200,000 Japanese, and then returns.

The reason I am so attuned to the “Marcheta” is because: 1. The role of music in pictures is a preoccupation of mine; 2. A gentleman was kind enough to upload the “Marcheta” to youtube, with its back story regarding John Wayne; and 3. It’s a beautiful piece of music.

However, viewers are subconsciously affected by Schertzinger’s waltz throughout the picture.

The Donna Reed Role

The real nurse Donna Reed played, was referred to merely as “Peggy” in the book. In the picture, her name was changed to Second Lieutenant Sandy Dayviss. Lord only knows why Wead would give the role such a peculiar spelling. (Her real name was U.S. Army Lieutenant Beulah Greenwalt Walcher.)

In both genres, the nurse has wonderful qualities. However, the real Peggy also has not-so-wonderful qualities.

Ford had Wead change her by eliminating the medical doctor who was her first and continuing nighttime lover, and by eliminating most of the time Sandy and Rusty spent together. Ford would have had four motivations for these changes.

Keeping Sandy and Rusty apart heightened the romantic tension;

The Hays Office might have blocked the picture altogether, or required that something terrible happen to Sandy, to compensate for her being a woman of loose morals, which you would do with a Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner or Lizbeth Scott, but not with the virginal Donna Reed;

Christian middle America might have rejected the character, and thus the picture; and

Although Ford occasionally dealt with fallen or morally gray female characters—the dead prostitute and her funeral cortege in Judge Priest (1934) and its 1953 re-make, The Sun Shines Bright; the Ava Gardner character in Mogambo (1953); and the sister-in-law of John Wayne’s character and their forbidden love, in The Searchers (1956); the nurse character as written in the book They were Expendable (1942) would have been unacceptable to Ford himself. He wanted a more saintly woman.

Donna Reed was ideal for this role and, as biographer of Wayne and Ford, Scott Eyman remarked, her performance was “pitch-perfect.”

Donna Reed had a pretty, wholesome, clean-scrubbed, All-American, girl-next-door look about her that was perfect for Sandy, and her performance would lead straight to her getting the role as Mary Hatch Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life the following year.

Reed was pretty, but no Garbo. (But she had been a beauty queen back in Iowa.) She was only in four scenes in the whole picture. She looks cute in her first scene, in the Army hospital. What makeup man Jack Dawn—surely at Ford’s insistence—did was to make her prettier in each successive scene, to the point where, in her final scene, when she and Wayne say goodbye on field telephones, she looks flat-out stunning.

We are seeing Second Lieutenant Sandy Dayviss through Lt. j.g. Rusty Ryan’s eyes.

One scene with Reed was not only moving, but very influential. It was a dinner at a house on the beach, in which she was the guest of honor, in which six officers are all in their finest dress uniforms (she’s in a civilian dress), Filipino waiters serve them improvised fare, and we hear “the Marcheta” in the distance.

Sandy is the only woman present. The dinner is for Rusty Ryan’s sake, with his C.O. and surrogate big brother, “Brick,” serving as host.

At one point, Sandy remarks, “All that’s missing is an orchestra and a floor show,” at which point Brick tells her she’s about to get a surprise. He stomps on the floor three times, and a half-dozen non-coms (including Ward Bond) under the floor boards begin serenading her.

That scene found its way the next year into Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, for my money the fifth-greatest talkie ever, as Bond (Bert the Cop) and Frank Faylen (Ernie Bishop the taxi driver) stand in the rain, and serenade George and Mary Bailey outside their wreck of a house, on their wedding night.

The dinner took place in the book, but aboard Lt. j.g. Robert B. Kelly’s PT boat, and was prepared by his cook, who would be killed in action by the Japanese shortly thereafter. (In the picture, the cook is named Squarehead Larsen, and was played by Harry Tenbrook; his real name was Willard J. Reynolds, and he was from Brooklyn.)

One of the most moving scenes in the picture comes when the officers all visit a young ensign, “Andy” Andrews (real name, Chandler) in the hospital, who is dying from his wounds. Everyone, including the dying man, puts on a brave, cheerful face. However, after the other officers depart, Brickley remains, and both men confess the ruse to each other.

However, in other scenes the men are unable to maintain a stoic or happy front. As “Doc,” who is leaving the Navy after 30 years, Jack Pennick (a tough old marine, in real life) is always either weeping, or on the verge of tears. In the funeral scene, after Ryan reads Stevenson’s poem, an enlisted man asks his permission to play “Taps” on his harmonica. As he plays, another seaman stands at attention, with a tear silently rolling down his cheek, and Ryan, unable to hold himself back, runs out of the room.

They are also unabashedly affectionate to each other. Chief Bosun’s Mate “Boats” Mulcahy (Ward Bond) comes up behind “Doc” and another man, and gives them a big bear hug. A few minutes later, Boats would preface his farewell to Brick with, “The book don’t mean much out here.”

And in one of the picture’s last images, as Ryan and Brickley sit against the wall of a cargo plane about to take them out of the Philippines, Ryan reaches around his commanding officer and surrogate big brother, squeezes his left arm, and gives him a big hug.

The camaraderie of military men would play a huge role in Ford’s postwar work.

Ford always tried to inject as much comic relief as possible into his dramas. In one scene, where in the absence of the officers the non-coms neglect a PT boat (to get some beer), and it runs aground and is damaged, the non-coms all compete to take the blame for the screw-up. In another, in order to get a fresh supply of torpedoes, Brick and Rusty blackmail a supply boat officer, threatening to tell his men of the time he’d starred as a female in a stage production at Annapolis. And in a third scene, the men from a boat that has seen little action practically beg to risk their lives on a mission, with each man addressing Ryan as “Rusty,” and ending his plea with “…sir?” Finally, Brick adds a plea of his own to Rusty, ending it with “…sir?”

In Ford’s prime, his characters were always bathed in music, which served to underscore pathos and mirth alike. Music from the score; music played by professionals within the scene; and music that the characters play or sing.

Early in the picture, on the night of December 7th, the officers and non-coms are all in a big, fancy nightclub in Manila, where an orchestra plays standards, sung by a Filipino girl singer. (They have yet to get the word.) In the bar, Boats Mulcahy leads the men in a rendition of the silly service song, “The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga.” When the announcement comes that the Japs have attacked Pearl, the orchestra and girl singer switch—after she wipes away her tears—to a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” And at the end, when the enlisted men are told they are being handed over to the Army, the harmonica player starts playing, “You’re in the Army Now.”

If what I have so far discussed were the whole picture, Expendable would have been be a masterpiece. However, Wead and Ford blew the ending.

They have Brickley and Ryan ordered—which indeed happened—to go with their two ensigns, back to the states (while leaving their enlisted men and boats behind), to campaign for Congress to spend more on PT boats. Can you say, “anti-climax”?

As the officers’ plane takes off, their men look skyward, the camera focuses on Bond giving us his best heavenly gaze, we hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the screen is filled with MacArthur writing, “We shall return” (actually, he’d said, “I shall return”).

What is this, Abe Lincoln in Illinois?!

Ford should have ended the picture with Brickley and Ryan getting MacArthur to Mindanao, on his way to Australia. Instead, the MacArthur adventure is reduced to a brief, dramatic moment in the middle of the picture.

Ford got stuck on “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because Expendable was his first postwar picture, and he reverted to prewar habits. One of his last prewar pictures was Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), starring Henry Fonda.

Lincoln had served as a front for Roosevelt. War was coming, and Democrats in the arts sought to talk a hesitant, isolationist public into going along. And so, they went crazy with Lincoln, using him for quasi-theological purposes: Young Mr. Lincoln; Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940); and in the early days of the war, Aaron Copland composed his minor masterpiece, A Lincoln Portrait (1942).

To be continued.