Beach Red (1967) – DVD

**½/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Cornel Wilde, Rip Torn, Burr DeBenning, Patrick Wolfe
screenplay by Clint Johnston, Donald A. Peters and Jefferson Pascal
directed by Cornel Wilde

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Naiveté can sometimes take you places. Beach Red is a pacifist war movie that believes so strongly in its material that it makes you want to believe, too–even when the material in question is hackneyed, unconvincing, or Ed Wood fanciful. The film's attempt to suggest an American version of Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White trades on the figure instead of dialogue and image instead of word, with director/star Cornel Wilde trying to give his attack on the futility of war a lyrical spin. "The futility of war" is, of course, an idea that's older than the hills, but so it was for Jancsó–and though Wilde lacks the Hungarian filmmaker's virtuosity, he has a similar attraction to agonized bodies and the power of a picture to trample over a person like a tank.

There's no real narrative excitement to Beach Red, which rehashes a twenty-year-old war-movie formula: a luckless batch of green recruits, led by Wilde and barked at by sergeant Rip Torn, lands on a beach in the Pacific Theater to deal harshly with enemy Japanese stationed in the jungle. The soldiers are scared, the battle is bloody, and people dream of girls back home. But Wilde manages to ride his camera over a sense of the story, offering merely the mindless forward motion of combat and the smell of fear in the air. Ever the egalitarian, he also extends sympathy to the Japanese, who would likewise rather be anywhere else as they yearn for their families.

Unfortunately, Wilde is no natural: whenever a character opens his mouth he inevitably spouts clichés. War is hell, I don't want to die, wish I were getting laid–all the greatest hits are here, stated baldly and without real nuance besides. We even get a tragic scene in which two soldiers sculpt a woman out of coconuts and a big rock (you had to be there). Worse, Wilde perpetrates a few quasi-avant-garde tricks with still photos in dealing with those distant women, garnishing them with some fashionable nudity; going for that all-important Chris Marker/Doris Wishman symbiosis, he comes up sadly short. In fact, enough things go wrong that you expect the film to fall into incoherence at any moment.

Still, it somehow hangs together, if by a thread. Wilde's secret is in placing total faith in the image, which not only gets you over that boxy dialogue but also forgives his motions at PLAYBOY pictorialism. He's trying to depict the cost of "bodies doing a job" (as the soldier's letter in High School so chillingly put it), and he's trying to strike a connection of sorts to the ever-escalating Vietnam tragedy–but by relying on the pictures, he accomplishes more than the many speeches in Stanley Kramer's trunk combined. Because it traffics in accepted wisdom, insightful Beach Red is not, yet Wilde reminds you of why that wisdom is accepted in the first place.

THE DVD
MGM's 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced DVD transfer of Beach Red is surprisingly detailed for a film with such heavy colour saturation, though blacks appear a tad sticky here and there. (A fullscreen transfer takes up the flipside of this single-layered platter.) Similarly fine, the Dolby 2.0 mono sound sports vivid rendering of incidental effects. The only extra is the film's trailer.

104 minutes; NR; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-10; Region One; MGM