Beach Red (1967)

User Rating:

6.3/10   

Director:

Cornel Wilde

Writers:

Peter Bowman (novel)
Clint Johnston (screenplay)

Release Date:

29 March 1968 (Finland)

Genre:

Drama | War

Tagline:

"I'm Gonna Bayonet 'Em, Break Their Arms, So They Don't Give Me No More Trouble! That's What We're Here For...To Kill...The Rest Is All Bull!"

Plot:

American troops storm ashore on a Japanese-held island and push inland while their enemies plan a counterattack in this look at warfare...

Plot Keywords:

Captain | WWII | Colonel | Japanese Soldier | Marine Corps US

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 1 nomination

Cast

Cornel Wilde	...	Capt. MacDonald / Narrator
Rip Torn	...	Gunnery Sgt. Ben Honeywell
Burr DeBenning	...	Pvt. Egan
Patrick Wolfe	...	Pve. Joseph Joshua Cliff
Jean Wallace	...	Julie MacDonald
Jaime Sánchez	...	Pvt. Colombo
Dale Ishimoto	...	Capt. Tanaka
Genki Koyama	...	Col. Sugiyama
Gene Blakely	...	Goldberg
Michael Parsons	...	Sgt. Lindstrom
Norman Pak	...	Pvt. Nakano
Dewey Stringer	...	Pvt. Mouse
Fred Galang	...	Lt. Domingo
Hiroshi Kiyama	...	Pvt. Mishio
Linda Albertano	...	Tall Girl

Runtime:

105 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:Approved | Canada:R (Nova Scotia) | Singapore:NC-16 | Norway:16 | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | Australia:M

Filming Locations:

Japan

Company:

Theodora Productions

Trivia:

Peter Bowman's uniquely constructed novel "Beach Red" was published in 1945, near the end of World War II. The book chronicles an assault landing on a Japanese-held island in the Pacific and the subsequent advance of a four-man Army recon patrol in the jungle, through the thoughts of one of its members. A contemporary review of the book stated the novel "looks like unrhymed verse, but...author Bowman stoutly insists (it) is "sprung prose." A modern-day reviewer accurately described "Beach Red" as "...not a novel. It is a 61-page prose poem, organized in non-rhyming stanzas with varying numbers of lines in each stanza."

Goofs:

Miscellaneous: Pvt. Egan is always eating cans of beans using white plastic spoons. Up until Vietnam only metal spoons were used.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Conker: Live and Reloaded (2004) (VG)

Soundtrack:

Title Song

Masterpiece

This masterful, beautiful picture by the underknown and underrated Cornel Wilde is a haunting look at the combat experience. Depending on one's point of view, Terrence Malick either paid tribute to it or blatantly copied it in THE THIN RED LINE (1998). The movies are amazingly similar in the way they use flashbacks and voiceover narration (as characters' thoughts spoken aloud) to immerse the audience in the characters as they fight. I love both movies -- Malick's has things going for it that Wilde's doesn't, such as a physical beauty and a superb score -- but BEACH RED is in some ways the more powerful of the two. It's even more immediate. The voiceovers are less forced and don't really go into the philosophizing that the voiceovers in THIN RED LINE do. The effect is to keep the audience more focused on the combat itself. In short, BEACH RED is more emotional (whereas THIN RED LINE is emotional AND philosophical/metaphorical).

The way this movie opens with 30 minutes of pure combat on a beach is also similar to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. In fact, BEACH RED is something of a combination of that movie and THIN RED LINE. Spielberg and Malick surely must both have studied this picture carefully. The last 5 minutes of BEACH RED comprise one of the most haunting and powerful statements on combat I have ever seen. This is a movie that will leave you thinking for a long time.