War is hell. So is this movie.

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 1999)

I saw the 1964 movie of James Jones's combat novel, The Thin Red Line, as a teenager. I liked it so much that I saw it twice. In fact, I liked that original version a lot better than Terrence Malick's 1998 remake. The original was in black-and-white and starred Jack Warden as Sgt. Eddie Welsh and Keir Dullea as Pvt. Don Doll. The original left out many of the characters in Jones's book, but as I recall, it faithfully depicted those characters and scenes from the book that it did use. Doll's stealing a pistol from another company--and being called on it by a sardonic Welsh--was a classic scene straight from the book. So was a gut-shot Tella screaming his head off as he tried to hold in his intestines. The combat was savage, and the use of black-and-white made it seem more real--like the newsreels of World War II combat.
Malick's remake suffers from a weak script and very bad casting overall. In the book, Sgt. Welsh had great force of personality--mad was a word Jones used to describe him, just as he used it to describe Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden in Jones's first book, From Here to Eternity, with whom he shared a number of traits. In the 1964 original, Jack Warden portrayed Sgt. Welsh as he was in the book--a supremely competent top sergeant who's tough, abusive, and hard to get along with. Sean Penn's Welsh is a smirking little pussy; he looks like he might cry if you smacked him. Not a forceful type at all, he lacked the screen presence to portray Welsh. And what's with that absurd hairstyle of his--a World War II first sergeant didn't go into combat with a Dairy Queen confection on his head.
In the book, Pvt. Witt is a hardheaded, combative--and unabashedly rednecked--little Kentuckian. He had some of the traits of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the central character in From Here to Eternity. But unlike Prewitt, Witt was not a reflective sort--just a hardbitten, fiercely-proud, impulsive young man given to resolving disputes with his fists. In Malick's treatment, Witt is a sensitive soul much given to introspection and cloudy philosophizing. It's almost as if Malick took the mental confusion and sentimentality that Jones attributed to Corp. Geoffrey Fife--a coward in the book--and gave them to Witt. In the book, Witt was a tough little cookie, and the quintessential combat infantryman. Malick ruined a good strong character.
He would have done better to leave out other characters. It's hard to compress a book into a movie, especially a book with so many sharply-drawn characters like Welsh, Doll, Witt, Charlie Dale, John Bell, Capt. Johnny Gaff, Mess Sgt. Storm, Lt. George Band and Capt. Bugger Stein (Malick renames his company commander Staros; why, when Stein's Jewishness was such a big part of the conflict between himself and the Anglo-Saxon Lt. Col. Gordon 'Shorty' Tall?). In the book, you knew who was who; in Malick's movie you often don't. True, there are moments--vignettes like the one with Tills and Mazzi aboard the troop transport--that give you glimpses of what the movie might have been like had Malick been true to the book, but on the whole I was disappointed.
The dreamy narration and slow music give the movie a miasmic quality that wasn't in the book. As a writer, James Jones had a very rough edge. He mangled words ('hystericky' to describe Corporal Fife comes to mind), made up others, and disregarded a lot of the niceties we tend to associate with good writing. But he was such a hell of a storyteller and wrote with such authority about the soldier's life that you didn't mind; the sledgehammer force of his writing just swept you along. Malick would have done a lot better to focus on fewer characters and use more of Jones's language in the narration. He should have hired a professional to write the screenplay instead of taking on the job himself. Malick's Thin Red Line is a statement movie. He wants to tell us that war is hell. We already knew that, buddy.
I thought some of Malick's combat scenes could have been handled better, especially the attack through the Japanese-held village. In the book, the GIs are edgy and tend to be trigger-happy. Malick opts for an elegiac treatment--combat as ballet. A bad mistake. As a vast body of historical evidence indicates, there was a strong undercurrent of racism in the Pacific War. The GIs and the marines hated the Japanese and regarded them almost as a subhuman species. The Japanese in their turn hated the U.S. troops. That element of racism and the savagery it engendered was very much a part of Jones's book, and it rarely makes an appearance in Malick's ponderous movie.
Nick Nolte does a solid job of portraying the overweeningly ambitious Lt. Col. Tall, although he plays him as a rather slovenly, raggedy-ass officer instead of the stern, clean-cut character in Jones's book.
Don't know why they needed John Travolta and George Clooney for this movie. Snatches of dialogue in the scene between Nolte and Travolta (as a general officer) aboard a troopship were lifted from the book, From Here to Eternity. Anyone who's read the book will recall the youthful Brig. Gen. Sam Slater ('from Sheyboygan, Wisconsin') making a disparaging comment about the aging Col. Jake Delbert (the regiment's 'Great White Father,' who makes a brief inebriated appearance as the regimental commander 'Old Whitehair' in The Thin Red Line--the book, that is). Slater tells Capt. Dana Holmes that he's old for a captain, but would be young for a major. In effect, Malick makes the cinematic Lt. Col. Gordon M. L. Tall a composite of three characters in two books--Col. Delbert, Capt. Dana Holmes and Tall. The Travlota-Nolte scene has no business being in the movie. Besides, 'General' Travolta would look more believable wearing a UPS uniform. And Clooney as Capt. Bosche? Get outta here.
Woody Harrelson is good as Sgt. Keck, but his death scene is a composite of the death scenes Jones wrote for Keck and Big Un Cash, the former taxi driver from Toledo. It was Cash who said, 'Write my old lady I died like a man.' In the book it was Thorne who promised to write Cash's wife, and then--after Cash dies--says, 'I tell them anything when they're like that.' Malick has Doll say that, and that's fine. But that scene happens much later in the book, when Charlie Company has been battle-hardened, and men like Doll have had ample opportunity to see dying men 'get like that.' In Malick1s treatment, Doll goes from scared kid to cynical combat veteran that first morning on the ridge.
In the book, Charlie Dale was a mean little bastard, a stocky ex-cook-turned-combat-infantryman who works on Japanese corpses with a pair of electrician's pliers, and collects a Bull Durham sack full of gold teeth. In the movie he looks like he's about to start spouting, 'To Be Or Not To Be.'
The one thing I found truly wonderful about the movie was that it was shot on location in Guadalcanal. Truly gorgeous photography. But overall I was bummed. Now I'm going to have to wait another 35 years for someone else to come along and do it right. Too bad the 1964 movie isn't available anywhere. I could watch it again, which is a lot more than I can say for Malick's pretentious picture. My advice? See the movie by all means, if only for the great photography. But make sure you read the book.