I should really hate Raoul Walsh’s adaptation of Norman Mailer’s great novel as much as my friend Marilyn Ferdinand hates Otto Preminger’s film of The Man With The Golden Arm, and the film’s first sequence justifies the prejudice entirely, turning the novel’s foul-mouthed but life-loving redneck Wilson (L.Q. Jones) into a rubbery, hooting caricature, cavorting with curvaceous dancers in a Honolulu
Some weird casting – Joey Bishop? – doesn’t help initial credulity either, as the film substitutes the novel’s rich, cleanly analysed gallery of pan-American types, with terse caricatures. But whilst the film is sapped of subtlety and performs some dodgy narrative alterations, it proves a surprisingly direct and occasionally smart adaptation of a complex, rhetorical tome. It is, at the very least, a true film of the novel, rather than some reimagined piece of opportunism, and it avoids prestige production showiness, as Walsh’s stripped-down direction coolly allows extended sequences of crucial dialogue and gritty action to play out with simple intensity. Most importantly, the film’s mordant ambivalence, neither exactly didactic or stoic, lets it hold its head up with The Bridge on the River Kwai and Paths of Glory from the year before in the emerging strain of ironic, anti-heroic war films.
The film’s offbeat energy is demonstrated particularly in two set-pieces of semi-naturalistic flow of interaction between the actors, scenes that allow the story’s depth to peek through. The first is between the soldiers in the platoon run by the malignant hard-ass Sgt. Croft (Aldo Ray), boiled on moonshine, which sees Croft deliver his addled speech on the necessities of soldiering and hatefully assaults the caricatured blonde Wilson has painted inside his sleeping bag, resembling as it does his own unfaithful wife (Lily St. Cyr). The second is between the prospective self-appointed übermensch General Cummings (an appropriately oily Massey), running the campaign to conquer the Japanese-held island of Anopopei, and his playboy liberal adjutant Lt. Hearn (Cliff Robertson, in a compact, promising performance). I don’t know if a touch like the flashback that sees Hearn recalling his endless sexual conquests in a pageant-like montage is witty or idiotic, but it does actualise the constant erotic fancy that the novel presented squarely in its soldiers, and gives some relief from Ray’s ugly mug.
The film also sports an eerie, compelling Bernard Herrmann score that captures the lurking menace of latent fascism and psychopathy endangering the lives of its PBI heroes, from the megalomaniac Cummings and the war-addicted Croft, both of whom symbolise and summarise the uglier faces of humanity revelling in violent combat. Where the script is flat and declarative, Herrmann’s music and Walsh’s taciturn film-making serve to do something like what Mailer’s punchy prose achieved, and realise a moody, threatening kind of Technicolor combat film. Importantly, the movie doesn’t elide the power and philosophical clashes struggles that are at the tale’s heart, which both Cummings and Croft have with the out-of-his-depth Hearn, and even manages to hint at the homoerotic underpinnings of Cummings’ persecution of Hearn. Walsh also retains many of the bitingly anti-climactic touches, the casual deaths for the most likeable characters, like the almost satirically cruel end of Roth (Bishop) on the mountain Croft finally tries to conquer, Moby Dick-like.
It does however monkey with the tale to make it Hearn rather than Wilson who’s carried back through the jungle by a desperately dedicated team, and he survives, rather than becoming a martyr to a conspiracy by varieties of power that was Mailer’s grim thesis and prediction for the post-War era. And Croft, who on the page fails only to achieve his triumph over the mountain, receives a straight villain’s comeuppance.
Such alterations weaken the irony of the conclusion in which one of Cummings’ functionaries wins the battle the General had planned to make his consummation, before a dreadful final summary from Hearn nearly but not quite despoils a tolerably neat film that’s neither flat-out disaster or a quiet triumph. It does stand relatively tall amongst Walsh’s last few, mostly desultory films: he was 71 by the time this was released. But Charles Laughton’s hoped-for adaptation remains a tantalising dream. As it was, the Naked and the Dead could well have been the personnel of RKO Studios, which folded shortly after the film’s completion.
