In this month’s “On the Horizon,” devoted to shorter articles on the cultural scene, RICHARD M. CLURMAN discusses the movie “Home of the Brave,” and NICOLAS CLARION reports on a recent French literary phenomenon. Mr. Clurman is editorial assistant on COMMENTARY. He was born in New York in 1925 and attended the University of Chicago, where he was managing editor of the University Observer. Mr. Clarion is a Rumanian-born French journalist now living in this country. He is the author of Le Glacis Soviétique, and has published articles in Commentary, the New Republic, the Reporter, and other periodicals.
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Home of the Brave is the latest in what by now is a familiar American cultural product: the “problem movie.” It tells the story of a volunteer patrol of American soldiers out on a pre-invasion mission to reconnoiter a Pacific island occupied by the Japanese. One of the volunteers—to everyone’s astonishment—is a Negro, taken along, with considerable misgivings, because he is the only available surveyor at the base. During a four-day sortie into the jungle, the members of the group manage to express a variety of attitudes toward the Negro surveyor. On the final day, the Negro’s close friend and benign protector is killed under circumstances so traumatic and full of guiltpotential for the Negro, that he is stricken with partial amnesia and paralysis of the legs. He is finally cured by an army psychiatrist who uncovers, and with equal swiftness explains away, the Negro’s sense of guilt. What scant plot there is serves merely as a peg on which to hang the film’s sententious dialogue. The situation develops and is resolved largely through a series of explanations, exchanges, speeches, and—as a last convenient resort—with the assistance of the psychiatrist, who explains, as actor-narrator, what the dialogue or action has only dimly hinted.
In a film without a real plot, and with virtually nothing but attitudes and some stray bits of psychological insight to keep the story alive, it is what the characters say that counts. In Home of the Brave they always seem to say the right or wrong thing depending upon whether they are right or wrong characters, just as if they understood what was expected of them as prototypes. To the credit of the film’s producers, the characters do seem thoroughly “researched,” even if they seldom resemble the soldiers one might encounter in an orderly room or on a reconnaissance patrol in the jungle.
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The economics of script writing for “problem movies” seems to demand that no character be wasted, that no event be allowed to pass without later assuming some special importance. It is unthinkable for a character to be wounded in the arm or for a map case to be left behind without the injured arm or the forgotten map case later showing up to turn the trick, prove the point, or in some contrived way complete the jig-saw puzzle. In Home of the Brave this economical attitude makes it necessary for each person and almost every speech to illustrate some discrete aspect of the relations between Negroes and whites. There are none of the wasted motions that are the very substance of less pointed lives.
Where the Jews in Crossfire and Gentleman’s Agreement could just as easily have been Eskimos, the Negro in Home of the Brave is fortunately an unmistakable Negro. Moss talks like a Negro, looks like one, and is plagued by problems that only a Negro experiences. When the psychiatrist explains away these differences to the satisfaction of Moss’s “head but not [his] heart,” there is Moss’s presence to refute him: the dark skin, the broad nose, the slight accent, the sensitivity on the subject of lynching. Moss’s opposite number, “T. J.”, is a composite malcontent. He not only uses freely such words as “nigger,” “boogie,” “shine,” “nigger-lover,” etc., but he combines this unsavory attribute with laziness (he complains about his bad back—the typical “goldbrick’s” excuse), selfishness (he would eat all the fried chicken if nobody stopped him), a feeling of superiority (he had a better civilian job than anybody else), unattractiveness to women (at thirty-six he’s so disagreeable that he’s been unable to find a wife), and—greatest of all sins—cowardice.
Sergeant Mingo is a delegate from the common-sense-and-decency caucus. Negroes get no special treatment from him. Mingo is interested neither in championing a cause nor in dealing with the “Negro problem.” He has “no more use for a bad black man than a bad white man and [he has] known plenty of both.” He is the American common man: sensible, affectionately tough, decent but not to a fault. It is patently easy, as one sits in the theater, to fit oneself comfortably into Mingo’s fatigues.
On the other hand, Moss’s friend Finch is a rather pathetic, confused figure. Finch’s relations with Moss are absurdly warm and intimate, cemented by something which quite unintentionally is made to look like homosexuality, and which in turn makes a shambles of what little authentic characterization there is. To be sure, it is seldom enough that a close friendship between two white men is adequately expressed on the screen, much less the more uncommon intimacy of a Negro and a white man. The result in Home of the Brave is an embarrassing relationship expressed throughout the film by Moss saying “Charming,” and Finch replying “Delightful,” almost as if they sensed uneasily the falseness of the happy-go-lucky “normal” roles assigned them. And, to give the whole saccharine lie away, when Finch is killed, and Mingo—now crippled for life—replaces Finch as the symbol of white enlightenment, then Mingo takes on all the attributes of his predecessor in this role, including one painful “Charming” and a few friendly slaps on the back.
Finally, to complete the race-relations spectrum, there is young Major Robinson, wellmeaning, politely prejudiced, but every inch the “good officer,” who takes care of his men, knows his job, and tries earnestly but unsuccessfully to forget that Moss is a Negro.
Before the patrol is safely off the island, with Finch’s corpse left behind, the “Negro problem” has been stated as fully as it can be on an island in the Pacific. There are half-hearted attempts to introduce other motifs: the loss of the maps, Mingo’s tender but unappreciated feeling for his wife, the Major’s youthful insecurity. But none of these comes through. It is the Negro, as a problem—his past, his present, and his future—that holds one’s attention. All else is trappings.
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The Film medium is seldom used today to tell a complicated or interesting story. What one finds instead is a set of devices, gimmicks, and angles that replace the narrative. Psychoanalysis, the latest of these devices, is in many ways the most convenient from the movie-maker’s point of view. It uses a strange but personal—“it could happen to you”—language. Like the flashback or the dream, it eliminates the necessity for telling a story within the conventions of time or place. It gives the deceptive appearance of drama to a totally undramatic device, the explanation—what cannot be shown by action or characterization, the psychiatrist explains. And—above all—it legitimizes that explanation by an appeal to “science.”
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Home of the Brave is built on the psychiatric couch. If a ragged edge of doubt remains about the source of Moss’s affliction, the doctor obligingly points out: “There, Mossy—that sensitivity—that’s the disease you’ve got. It was there before anything happened on the island. It started way back. It isn’t your fault. You didn’t ask for it. It’s a legacy. A hundred and fifty years of slavery and second-class citizenship, of being different. You had the feeling of difference pounded into you when you were a child—and being a child you turned it into guilt. You’ve always had that guilt inside of you. . . . Do you understand?”
And so Moss is made to “understand,” to see his problem in an entirely new perspective—indeed, in a perspective that the film has completely failed to prepare him and its audience for; in a curious way, the “explanation” takes on a momentum of its own and finally belies the plot. Does Moss have the sickness, or do his white antagonists? Is it really a question of his “sensitivity,” or is one permitted to retain the original impression that Moss has in fact been hounded and persecuted by the white world since childhood? Is Home of the Brave a movie to “adjust” the Negro or to dramatize his very real problems?
Certainly it tries to do both at times. But when the psychiatric explanation is in—and it is unmistakably the point of the film—the “message” has been changed to a comfortable drawing-room observation. What began as the mindlessness and error of the white world is transformed into a Negro neurosis, a persecution obsession, in its very abnormality less disquieting than if the original impression remained that Moss was not sick, suffered no myopia, saw the world really as it is for him. But Moss is cured. As the film ends, he and Mingo are returning to the States happily contemplating the bar and grill they will run together, each with his own personal “handicap” to face and conquer. The Negro is “adjusted,” he holds his head high and erect, in a perfect position for the executioner’s axe.
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Home of the Brave very much resembles the livelier educational films. It has the same documentary style, the same unreality, the same confident assurance that no problem need go unsolved, and the same narrator—this time in the more glamorous guise of the psychiatrist.
Despite its many faults—its artistic failure, its slavish devotion to its rather confused “point,” and the fact that it deals with the Negro in the most untypical circumstances (in the army, in combat, on a Pacific atoll, and on a psychiatric couch)—it does try, as honestly as it knows how, to say the “right” thing in the most effective way, using the most impressive evidence it can command. It would certainly be ungrateful—if not a trifle snobbish—to dismiss Home of the Brave for its artistic shortcomings alone. What is most disturbing about the film is that its very effectiveness as persuasion is questionable. Certainly the film medium does offer immense possibilities for circulating an idea or for proving a point, but it may be precisely these rich potentialities for persuasion that lead earnest and well-intentioned producers astray: in their preoccupation with the “point,” they fall in to a factitiousness that no high-minded intentions can disguise.
Home of the Brave may be taken as a sign of heightened consciousness in an industry rarely credited (except by its own spokesmen) with a sense of public responsibility, as a long-overdue act of contrition, or as a rebuke to the mythically-powerful Southern theater owner whose tender sensibilities have hitherto demanded so much protection. If the film is indeed any of these, then perhaps it is not too optimistic to hope that in the future we may have, not more “pro-Negro” films, but films in which the Negro in America will be portrayed as a living creature surrounded by other living creatures who are something more than slaves to a point.
For, after all, it is only the teacher—rarely the student—who really enjoys the educational film.
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