2840rboc sp14
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Behind the Scenes of The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
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Sydney Pollack introducing the 1951 movie "The Red Badge of Courage" starring Audie Murphy for Turner Classic Movies .
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The making of the movie…• Director John Huston used unusual compositions and camera angles
drawn from film noir to create a battlefield environment that is foreboding and alienating.
• Huston believed his film could have been "his best," but as he tells Lillian Ross: "They don't want me to make this picture. And I want to make this picture."
• How the film was made is the subject of Ross's 1952 book Picture, a masterpiece of journalism, originally in The New Yorker magazine as a 5-part series.
• MGM cut the film's length to 69 minutes and added narration following supposedly poor audience test screenings.
• View the made-for-TV movie version from 1974, starring Richard Thomas (of The Waltons fame). Note the differences in production techniques from the earlier (1951) movie.
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The leading actors were chosen for the 1951 film as much for their off-screen fame as for their acting skills. For example, the character of Henry
Fielding, “the Youth,” was played by World War II hero, Audie Murphy.
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…as Tom Wilson, the “Loud Soldier”
Bill Mauldin was a sergeant for the 45th Division's press corps and for the Army’s “Stars and Stripes” newspaper during World War II . His acting career was not his “day job” after the War; he was a Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist for St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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The cartoon character “Willie” (left) and his G.I. buddy “Joe” were Maudin’s Pulitzer-prize winning creations.
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Narrated by James Whitmore.
The studio decided to add voice-over narration to clarify plot events for
the viewer, a strategy Huston opposed.
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Perennial Hollywood tug-of-war:Art vs. Commerce
"The only picture I ever made that seems as though it's
going to be marked down simply as a box-office failure is
The Red Badge of Courage," Huston told the film's
producer, “and I thought that was the best picture I ever
made." http://journalism.nyu.edu/publishing/archives/portfolio/books/book59.html