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A lot of corny things are true
So I finally found a movie where Elisha Cook, Jr. gets to play the hero. It's a 36-minute U.S. Army training film from 1943. That's a hell of a way to go for a leading role.
To be fair to Fighting Men: Baptism of Fire, it was a striking enough training film to receive a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 16th Academy Awards. I find this a fascinating classification for a short film whose opening credits clearly read "Official Training Film—War Department—Produced by the Signal Corps for the Commanding General Ground Army Forces 1943" and whose cast includes, albeit uncredited, one of the more notable character faces of the time. It's not by any stretch of the imagination nonfiction, even if Cook really did serve in the Army and the information being communicated is intended to be realistic; it only makes sense in context and even then it's the outlier. Its competitors in 1944 were Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak's The Battle of Russia, John Huston's Report from the Aleutians, Oliver Lundquist's War Department Report, and—the winner—Roy Boulting's Desert Victory, all of which are combinations of documentary and propaganda; the category had only been added to the Oscar roster in 1942 and I suspect it was still sorting its definitions out. It's snarkily tempting nonetheless to wonder if the Academy just assumed audiences wouldn't recognize Cook because he's not playing a creep or a fall guy, just an ordinary, levelheaded G.I. steadying a friend's nerves the night before their first experience of battle. Both of them are scared, but Cook's Bill is the one with the advice the troops are supposed to listen to. Some of it is even pretty good advice, like Bill's position on anxiety vs. information:
Well, when you know something pretty bad's going to happen to you, you can do one of two things. You can worry about it till you're ready to blow your top. Or you can find out as much as you can about what it's really going to be like. You take the second choice—I mean, find out as much as you can—you've given yourself a break. 'Cause nothing's ever as bad as you think it's going to be . . . I started to talking to whoever I could find that'd been through it before. A couple of our non-coms have. They don't open up easy and they don't talk much, but they don't kid you—it's tough. But then there are a lot of other guys that've been through it before us. Keep that in your mind—well, you can sort of get set for it . . . Every guy I talked to said the same thing. Your first battle, your worst fight, isn't with the enemy. It's with yourself.
His buddy Jim appears to be played by Russell Arms, although I got that information no thanks to IMDb; he's the sensitive boyish one who can't stop thinking about the college friend he saw come back from the front lines blinded or the girl he left behind without marrying and now might never see again, two trains of thought which Bill cautions him lead straight to cracking up. "Here's the way it works. You're going into battle. Right away, you start thinking about home. Then you start thinking about all the things that can keep you from getting back there again. Result—you're too scared to think about your job. And if you want to come back, this is one job you got to think about." Peter Whitney rounds out the range of types as the big boastful lug who jeers at Bill after a German flyby causes the platoon to scatter for cover: "You hit the dirt like you was running for home with the score tied in the ninth." Of course, under fire, "You don't catch me diving into a shell-hole for no German squarehead" Pete is the one who breaks and has to be pushed back into action while Bill who looks as easily apprehensive as any other Elisha Cook, Jr. character is tough, quick, and steadfast—"Cold as ice. Little guy, too." Most of the narration belongs to Jim, the audience surrogate who makes himself reload his rifle and push on through his fear, sickened and second-guessing himself, finally doing his job: "Now I can fight . . . You're damn right I can fight!"
It's not unreasonable that he's afraid, though. The violence in Baptism of Fire is astonishingly gorier than anything out of Hollywood at the time. A head-shot man doesn't just have blood dripping down the side of his face, it's choking up out of his mouth. Staged explosions are mixed with footage of the real thing. The crew of a half-destroyed tank try to climb to safety, but one of them is burning alive and the other is shot down as he tries to pull his fellow out: "Oh, God—I'm burning up!" Dead men stare with their eyes open, their throats opened by shrapnel. Hitting a German officer across the face with a rifle breaks his cheekbone. Bayoneting an enemy soldier is effective but gross. So is the aftermath of the battle, when even characters who are obviously going to survive are bruised and bleeding under their bandages. What really interests me about this aspect of the film is not that it was permissible to depict the violence, because any media made for the troops had to be able to bend the Production Code or risk being laughed off the screen—a similar realism extends to the language, so that a sergeant yells, "Get the lead out of your ass!" to a bunch of G.I.'s restarting a bogged-down truck and Jim in combat regularly thinks of the enemy as "bastards"—but that it was possible. I genuinely hadn't realized that the necessary makeup effects existed in 1943 because no one was being allowed to demonstrate them in civilian productions. They stand up to similar effects work today. I'm sure it was chocolate syrup or something else that photographed convincingly, but that mouthful of blood and broken teeth was nasty.
And for a near-first in my experience of his acting, Elisha Cook, Jr. doesn't even die. He gets winged by a sniper and marches on after the victory with his arm in a sling, gesturing to a tank with his elbow and shouting, "Jim, when this is over, I'm going to take one of those tin cans home with me!" (Jim volunteers in reply, "I'll be your chauffeur!") The whole thing finishes with Pete, Bill, and Jim in a bar somewhere vague but beer-serving in de-occupied Europe, listening to an unending rowdy chorus of "You Are My Sunshine" and thinking over their behavior in battle. Mostly Bill seems to be annoyed that he got shot: "Thought I had the odds all figured out, didn't I? Well, don't cut yourself down too much. At least you had the right angle: keep your mind off yourself. I was right. That's what you got to do." And then they realize that they are all being way too introspective and nowhere near drunk enough and raise their steins: "Hey, what the hell are we waiting for?"–"I don't know, what the hell are we waiting for?" Cue the booze until it's time to move on to the next front.
If you would like to view this peculiar form of ephemera for yourself, unlike most of the movies I recommend it is currently available on YouTube, slightly faster than its stated runtime. You can even chase it with Private Snafu if you want to see what Chuck Jones, Ted Geisel, Mel Blanc, and other luminaries of the animated world were doing during the war. I want to sleep so that I can write about the other movie I saw last night, the one that really amazed me. This educational material brought to you by my veteran backers at Patreon.
To be fair to Fighting Men: Baptism of Fire, it was a striking enough training film to receive a nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 16th Academy Awards. I find this a fascinating classification for a short film whose opening credits clearly read "Official Training Film—War Department—Produced by the Signal Corps for the Commanding General Ground Army Forces 1943" and whose cast includes, albeit uncredited, one of the more notable character faces of the time. It's not by any stretch of the imagination nonfiction, even if Cook really did serve in the Army and the information being communicated is intended to be realistic; it only makes sense in context and even then it's the outlier. Its competitors in 1944 were Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak's The Battle of Russia, John Huston's Report from the Aleutians, Oliver Lundquist's War Department Report, and—the winner—Roy Boulting's Desert Victory, all of which are combinations of documentary and propaganda; the category had only been added to the Oscar roster in 1942 and I suspect it was still sorting its definitions out. It's snarkily tempting nonetheless to wonder if the Academy just assumed audiences wouldn't recognize Cook because he's not playing a creep or a fall guy, just an ordinary, levelheaded G.I. steadying a friend's nerves the night before their first experience of battle. Both of them are scared, but Cook's Bill is the one with the advice the troops are supposed to listen to. Some of it is even pretty good advice, like Bill's position on anxiety vs. information:
Well, when you know something pretty bad's going to happen to you, you can do one of two things. You can worry about it till you're ready to blow your top. Or you can find out as much as you can about what it's really going to be like. You take the second choice—I mean, find out as much as you can—you've given yourself a break. 'Cause nothing's ever as bad as you think it's going to be . . . I started to talking to whoever I could find that'd been through it before. A couple of our non-coms have. They don't open up easy and they don't talk much, but they don't kid you—it's tough. But then there are a lot of other guys that've been through it before us. Keep that in your mind—well, you can sort of get set for it . . . Every guy I talked to said the same thing. Your first battle, your worst fight, isn't with the enemy. It's with yourself.
His buddy Jim appears to be played by Russell Arms, although I got that information no thanks to IMDb; he's the sensitive boyish one who can't stop thinking about the college friend he saw come back from the front lines blinded or the girl he left behind without marrying and now might never see again, two trains of thought which Bill cautions him lead straight to cracking up. "Here's the way it works. You're going into battle. Right away, you start thinking about home. Then you start thinking about all the things that can keep you from getting back there again. Result—you're too scared to think about your job. And if you want to come back, this is one job you got to think about." Peter Whitney rounds out the range of types as the big boastful lug who jeers at Bill after a German flyby causes the platoon to scatter for cover: "You hit the dirt like you was running for home with the score tied in the ninth." Of course, under fire, "You don't catch me diving into a shell-hole for no German squarehead" Pete is the one who breaks and has to be pushed back into action while Bill who looks as easily apprehensive as any other Elisha Cook, Jr. character is tough, quick, and steadfast—"Cold as ice. Little guy, too." Most of the narration belongs to Jim, the audience surrogate who makes himself reload his rifle and push on through his fear, sickened and second-guessing himself, finally doing his job: "Now I can fight . . . You're damn right I can fight!"
It's not unreasonable that he's afraid, though. The violence in Baptism of Fire is astonishingly gorier than anything out of Hollywood at the time. A head-shot man doesn't just have blood dripping down the side of his face, it's choking up out of his mouth. Staged explosions are mixed with footage of the real thing. The crew of a half-destroyed tank try to climb to safety, but one of them is burning alive and the other is shot down as he tries to pull his fellow out: "Oh, God—I'm burning up!" Dead men stare with their eyes open, their throats opened by shrapnel. Hitting a German officer across the face with a rifle breaks his cheekbone. Bayoneting an enemy soldier is effective but gross. So is the aftermath of the battle, when even characters who are obviously going to survive are bruised and bleeding under their bandages. What really interests me about this aspect of the film is not that it was permissible to depict the violence, because any media made for the troops had to be able to bend the Production Code or risk being laughed off the screen—a similar realism extends to the language, so that a sergeant yells, "Get the lead out of your ass!" to a bunch of G.I.'s restarting a bogged-down truck and Jim in combat regularly thinks of the enemy as "bastards"—but that it was possible. I genuinely hadn't realized that the necessary makeup effects existed in 1943 because no one was being allowed to demonstrate them in civilian productions. They stand up to similar effects work today. I'm sure it was chocolate syrup or something else that photographed convincingly, but that mouthful of blood and broken teeth was nasty.
And for a near-first in my experience of his acting, Elisha Cook, Jr. doesn't even die. He gets winged by a sniper and marches on after the victory with his arm in a sling, gesturing to a tank with his elbow and shouting, "Jim, when this is over, I'm going to take one of those tin cans home with me!" (Jim volunteers in reply, "I'll be your chauffeur!") The whole thing finishes with Pete, Bill, and Jim in a bar somewhere vague but beer-serving in de-occupied Europe, listening to an unending rowdy chorus of "You Are My Sunshine" and thinking over their behavior in battle. Mostly Bill seems to be annoyed that he got shot: "Thought I had the odds all figured out, didn't I? Well, don't cut yourself down too much. At least you had the right angle: keep your mind off yourself. I was right. That's what you got to do." And then they realize that they are all being way too introspective and nowhere near drunk enough and raise their steins: "Hey, what the hell are we waiting for?"–"I don't know, what the hell are we waiting for?" Cue the booze until it's time to move on to the next front.
If you would like to view this peculiar form of ephemera for yourself, unlike most of the movies I recommend it is currently available on YouTube, slightly faster than its stated runtime. You can even chase it with Private Snafu if you want to see what Chuck Jones, Ted Geisel, Mel Blanc, and other luminaries of the animated world were doing during the war. I want to sleep so that I can write about the other movie I saw last night, the one that really amazed me. This educational material brought to you by my veteran backers at Patreon.
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You're welcome! Enjoy, or find it useful, whichever!
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Seriously, I think the only other movie I've seen him survive is Pigskin Parade (1936), where a death would have been extremely distressing. Okay, and Rosemary's Baby (1968), but there he's a Satanist; all bets are off. [edit] Derp: Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). But it's a close call!
A thing I realized while transcribing Bill's speech: it's nice to hear him talking quietly. He's the voice of soldierly reason in Baptism of Fire, so he's going to get the most sensible lines, but he's also a regular-sized character. He looks steadily at things; he's concerned for his friend, he's scared for himself, he's courageous under fire and he feels like a bit of an idiot about all the philosophizing afterward, but he should give himself a break, a lot of people got shot in World War II. I think the only character I've seen him play with comparable dignity is Harry Jones, the "funny little guy" from The Big Sleep (1946) who drinks poison for the sake of a woman who wouldn't have done the same for him, but knows what he's doing and chooses to protect her anyway. If we're going by deaths—and with Elisha Cook, Jr., there are plenty to choose from—Harry's is his best one, but I was just as glad that Baptism of Fire didn't add to their number.
Anybody show up from Brooklyn?
Captain America not sighted, I'm afraid.
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Also Jack Larson (Jimmy) has great fun in this episode, doing a rather terrible Bogart impression.
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That's cool!
Also Jack Larson (Jimmy) has great fun in this episode, doing a rather terrible Bogart impression.
All right, is this available online? [edit] On YouTube, if I'm willing to pay for it. Which I am not. Dammit. That sounded delightful.
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I didn't realize that training films were done as stories, but that makes good sense. It sounds much more memorable than a bulleted list or a man in a suit, talking.
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The Private Snafu cartoons are instructional, but they're also all by counterexample—Private Snafu does something boneheaded which the watching recruits are encouraged not to imitate, frequently because it gets him killed in addition to damaging the war effort or betraying his country, etc. I'd never seen the live-action equivalent and I certainly didn't expect it to include a miniature war film starring Elisha Cook, Jr. I am weirdly interested now in watching more.