Film Review by Tom Pearson:
The Thin Red Line
The message in The Thin Red Line — from the James Jones' novel of the same name — is that we live in a paradise on earth, but only some of us come to fully know it. The opening shot in the film is of a crocodile which lumbers toward the camera and slides into the water, its prehistoric eye appearing to stare at us briefly. The scene is a Pacific island where two young soldiers are living among the island's people. In a long first sequence an idyllic existence is evoked, and although there's a voice-over of one of the soldier's thoughts, there is no explanation as to why the two are there until a US navy frigate shows up. They've skipped out on their company. "How many time's this you've gone AWOL?", the company sergeant asks the soldier in the ship's brig. "I've seen another world", he replies. "There ain't no other world" the sergeant retorts. "There's just this one, with each of us in it, alone." That sentiment says a lot about James Jones' world view. Jones wrote novels (beginning with From Here To Eternity in 1951 to Whistle in 1977) about the army and about war but his soldiers, though sometimes heroic, are not upright supermen: there are fascist-minded sergeants, ambitious commanding officers, drunkards and murderers and plain, ordinary men who are forced to live with fear and pain. Jones was not a great writer. He had no profound grasp of the use of language and dialogue or even character development. But he wrote with brutal honesty of what he saw. Certainly, he did not he set out to glorify war. There is not much character development in this film. So, even with its long list of star names, there are no star turns, which suits the thrust of the story. As the ship approaches its destination, a Japanese-occupied island in WW2, fear grows among the soldiers on board preparing to go ashore. As they trudge through the lush bush the camera focuses on beautiful tropical birds, follows the flight of a butterfly, the darting retreat of a lizard. When the fighting starts it is truly horrific. The camera is amongst the soldiers in waste-high grass on the side of a hill, placing the viewer along side them: you know there is no escape from this. They are all terrified. At one point when two of them are ordered further up they simply stare at each other for a long time in disbelief. One soldier breaks down altogether, not in hysterics, or totally blank-faced, but searching inside himself to find an acceptable alternative to reality. "Don't touch me", he cries, "just don't touch me." Even while the carnage is happening all around them, soldiers forced down into the cover of the grass discover wonders of nature: a leaf-green insect that closes at the touch of a finger, a snake that forces them to roll wide-eyed out of its path. When they finally overwhelm the Japanese positions they find them as wretched and terrified as themselves. This is all true to the spirit of Jones' novel, which is basically about individuals being driven collectively towards annihilation. So too is the commanding officer's explanation of his refusal to have water supplies rushed to the men: "So what if some of them die. We don't want to stop now. You're young, you've got your war. I've waited 15 years for this opportunity." A main fault of the film is that it's too long. It's a relief to watch a picture that takes its time, but the last section that emphasises its message of paradise found could lose 20 minutes. And its treatment of the Islanders sails pretty close to paternalism. Nonetheless, it makes its point. Jones never set out to tell the whole story, and while you might not agree with his philosophy, which is a form of religious revelation, The Thin Red Line is not a sermon on the righteousness of US military might. In one scene, as the camera observes the wreckage of a human being sitting in the rain staring at his hands, there comes the voice of the soldier who we first heard speak at the beginning: "War don't ennoble men. It turns them into dogs, it poisons their souls."