| 10th October 2006 01:12 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Oct. 10, 2006
Hollywood Reporter
Flags of Our Fathers
By Kirk Honeycutt
Bottom line: A complex, fascinating take on the concept of heroism in war.
Opens Friday, Oct. 20
Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" does a most difficult and brave thing and does it brilliantly. It is a movie about a concept. Not just any concept but the shop-worn and often wrong-headed idea of "heroism."
The movie performs this task amid the fog of war on Iwo Jima in 1945, when the Associated Press' Joe Rosenthal took the iconic photograph of six American servicemen raising Old Glory on Mount Suribachi. The movie deconstructs that moment, shattering it into a jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and flash-forwards, to explore how that photograph turned into a major prop of the U.S. government's war bonds campaign and how the government designated the three surviving flag raisers as "heroes."
From a boxoffice standpoint, this might be a rare instance of having your cake and eating it, too: The film also takes a hard, unblinking look at the cynicism and PR manipulation that went into the war bond tour and what we today recognize as the nascent fluttering of the cult of celebrityhood, when the three surviving flag-raisers were among the most famous men in the U.S.
Yet Eastwood packs the movie with action as tough and bloody as such benchmark films as "Saving Private Ryan," "Black Hawk Down" and "We Were Soldiers." Nor does he ever deny the sacrifice and achievements of the men who fought and died in the battle for Iwo Jima. So the movie should attract viewers across the political spectrum. Critical acclaim and year-end awards can only expand its potential boxoffice.
The film is based on a book by James Bradley (with Ron Powers) about his father, Navy Corpsman John Bradley, one of the flag-raisers who nevertheless would never discuss that or any other aspect of his war experiences with his family. William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis' screenplay has a complex structure that takes awhile for audiences to read.
A soldier runs alone in a bleak landscape that looks like the lunar surface, then awakens in a cold sweat in his bed, his wife comforting him, many years later. Three soldiers, scaling a mountaintop with explosions everywhere, reach the summit and survey a sea of faces in a football stadium, roaring approval for this re-enactment of their experiences of only weeks before. Meanwhile, a man in more recent times -- we later realize this is the son, James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) -- interviews key people who knew his father.
In this manner, the movie moves back and forth in time to watch people come to grips with the question of heroism and how that flag raising became a symbol Americans desperately clung to as the war in the Pacific hung in the balance. "If you can get a picture, the right picture, you can win a war," a retired captain (Harve Presnell) tells Bradley.
The film introduces the six servicemen as U.S. warships steam steadily toward Iwo Jima. Initially it's hard to tell who's who, but Eastwood and his writers probably do this deliberately as they want us to consider these young men as ordinary Joes doing a job in combat. It is totally random how fate chooses the six -- and actually it's three as the others are killed not long after the photo is taken.
Within days the U.S. government calls the surviving flag-raisers back to the mainland: Doc Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), a Navy Corpsman called upon to help the Marines raise the flag; Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford), a "runner" who happened to bring the flag to the mountaintop; and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an Indian who is the most uncomfortable at finding himself a national hero.
For most of the war bond tour, the trio's "minder" (John Benjamin Hickey) has double duty. He must overcome the men's resistance to playing heroes, a label they feel belongs to others more deserving. And he must keep Ira sober. War has kept the Marine's alcoholism in check; back home he fears banquet halls more than the blood-stained soil of Iwo Jima.
Then the background to the photo itself undermines the men's sense of purpose. The fact is that Rosenthal's famous photo is of the second flag-raising that day. The first occurs before Rosenthal made it up the top. When he does arrive, he finds soldiers, who had been laying a telephone line, preparing to raise a second, larger flag the moment the first one comes down. And that photo, taken blindly at the last moment, is the one that hit the wires worldwide. This leads to confusion, cleared up only years later, as to the identities of the soldiers in the photo since none of their faces is visible.
Cinematographer Tom Stern shoots in washed-out colors, much like old color film long faded so that only blues, grays, browns and flesh tones prevail. This situates the film in a hallucinatory no-man's-land between Iwo Jima and a peaceful U.S., where no one has any concept of the horrors these men endured.
There are many astonishing moments. A Japanese soldier lies dying next to a critically injured Yank, the two men now linked in death. A search of caves deep within the island causes American soldiers to realize the surviving Japanese are committing suicide with their grenades. The persistent racism Ira faces is so casual that everyone is blithely unaware of the demeaning nature of their remarks.
Eastwood's own musical score, infusing the film with understated valor and light melancholy, and Henry Bumstead's fine sets and period design are crucial components of Eastwood's vision of a world that needs "heroism" to help it understand and process the incomprehensible cruelty and sacrifice of war. Says one vet, "We need easy-to-understand truths and damn few words."
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Ira Hayes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Hayes
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Artist/Band: Cash Johnny
Lyrics for Song: Ballad of Ira Hayes
Lyrics for Album: 16 Biggest Hits
Ira Hayes,
CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war
Gather round me people there's a story I would tell
About a brave young Indian you should remember well
From the land of the Pima Indian
A proud and noble band
Who farmed the Phoenix valley in Arizona land
Down the ditches for a thousand years
The water grew Ira's peoples' crops
'Till the white man stole the water rights
And the sparklin' water stopped
Now Ira's folks were hungry
And their land grew crops of weeds
When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man's greed
CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war
There they battled up Iwo Jima's hill,
Two hundred and fifty men
But only twenty-seven lived to walk back down again
And when the fight was over
And when Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
Was the Indian, Ira Hayes
CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war
Ira returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored; Everybody shook his hand
But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no crops, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira'd done
And when did the Indians dance
CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war
Then Ira started drinkin' hard;
Jail was often his home
They'd let him raise the flag and lower it
like you'd throw a dog a bone!
He died drunk one mornin'
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was a grave for Ira Hayes
CHORUS:
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won't answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin' Indian
Nor the Marine that went to war
Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lyin' thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died
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[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 10th October 2006 01:16 PM |
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| glencar |
October Surprise?? |
| 10th October 2006 03:05 PM |
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| mojoman |
my dad was in the navy during WWII and occupied japan after the war. he never spoke at all about his experiences in the pacific island campaigns. i only heard about it from his peers and that was only very little. i believe the stuff they saw was just to dark to tell. that and they felt that they just did their duty and were lucky to have made it back alive when so many others didn't. |
| 10th October 2006 06:51 PM |
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| Starbuck |
i am pumped for this movie.
i am also pumped to put in a good word for the book i am reading now, "the forgotten soldier", by guy sajer. sajer was an alsatian german who was drafted into the wehrmacht at age 16....sent to the russian front after stalingrad...my god, what a story. i don't think its completely historically accurrate, but it is a hell of a read. pick it up immediately. that is an order.
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| 15th October 2006 12:29 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Posted October 15, 2006
Appleton Post Cresent.com
Veteran felt star status was undue
Betty Bradley says late husband, flag-raiser John Bradley, never would have wanted spotlight from new Iwo Jima movie
By Heather LaRoi
Post-Crescent staff writer
Betty Bradley is certain that if her late husband were still alive, he would be nowhere near Friday's opening of the new movie "Flags of Our Fathers."
John Bradley simply would not want the attention.
The film, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a book by James Bradley, John and Betty's son, aims to tell the real story of one of the most bloody battles of World War II, the fight for the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima.
It's also the story of John Bradley, who was there on Iwo Jima and, because he was part of a 1/400th-of-a-second coincidence of time and place — a flag-raising ceremony captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal — will be forever associated with the battle.
"My feeling on this is that he's looking down smiling at all of us and saying, 'If you want to do this, go right ahead. I'm not there to be embarrassed by all the attention,'" said Betty, who lives in Wausau. "He'd be very uncomfortable. He'd do anything (not to be there). As my son (James) has said, he'd move to Alaska and just not have a phone."
John "Doc" Bradley, who spent much of his youth in Appleton and graduated from Appleton High School in 1941, was a 21-year-old Navy corpsman serving with the Marines at the time of what became known as "The Photograph."
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning shot, Bradley and five Marines — Mike Strank, Johnstown, Pa.; Harlon Block, Yorktown, Texas; Franklin Sousley, Hilltop, Ky.; Ira Hayes, Sacaton, Ariz.; and Rene Gagnon, Manchester, N.H. — were photographed raising a flag atop Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945.
The image, which has been called the greatest wartime photo ever, has been reproduced millions of times, and even cast in larger-than-life bronze in Arlington, Va.
James Bradley never intended to write a book about the flag-raising. He started out, quite simply, in search of his father, or a part of his father that it turns out none of the family had ever known.
It was only after John's death in 1994 when the family discovered three cardboard boxes in his office in Antigo that contained letters and photographs relating to his war years. It was only then they also discovered he'd been awarded the Navy Cross, the nation's second-highest award for valor.
John Bradley had simply never mentioned it.
"I knew nothing of all this, growing up in Antigo," wrote James Bradley in "Flags of Our Fathers" (Bantam Books, 2000).
"… This sense of distance was a little strange, of course, given that we all knew, early on, that our father was a figure in the most famous war photograph ever made. But that's all we knew. Our father himself never mentioned the photograph. He didn't encourage anyone else to mention it. No copies of it existed in the house."
Kate Bradley, an Appleton artist and the eldest of eight Bradley siblings, said that within the family they followed John Bradley's lead in downplaying The Picture.
"It was just a picture," she said. "I also didn't get the magnitude of what happened when that picture hit the newswires, that people actually cut out the newsprint picture and hung it in their homes. I didn't get that until I read my brother's book. Then it was like, oh my gosh."
Kate Bradley also recalled the time when a new high school history teacher discovered that her dad was the flag-raiser.
"When he found out, he said, 'Would you ask your dad to come in. Just ask him,'" she said. "It was like this burden that I carried home with me, that I had to ask my dad. I mean, I knew the answer I was going to get — and that's what I got. He wouldn't come in and talk to the class, he wasn't a hero, he was just doing his job and the men who lost their lives were the real heroes."
Nonetheless, The Photograph catapulted Bradley and the other two surviving flag-raisers into a national frenzy of patriotic fervor that seemed so removed from the atrocities that had taken place on the island.
The flag-raisers were paraded around the country as part of the Mighty 7th War Bond Tour, and were pretty much hounded, off and on, the rest of their lives because of their connection to the fabled — albeit misunderstood — flag-raising.
The battle on Iwo Jima, which involved 30,000 Marines, was the costliest battle in Marine Corps history. More than 18,000 were wounded in the 36-day fight and almost 7,000 Americans lost their lives, including flag-raisers Strank, Block and Sousley, who died in combat shortly after the photo was taken.
Memories of the horrors that occurred there haunted the survivors.
"Some veterans cope with pain via alcohol or drugs. Others seek psychiatric counseling — or don't seek it. Here is where I think my father may have been a little different: He coped by making himself not think about the war, the island, his dead comrades. He coped by getting on with life.
"… But forgetting had not come easily for John Bradley. It had taken him a while to forget. He may have spoken about Iwo for only seven or eight disinterested minutes to Elizabeth Van Gorp on their first date. But after they were married, my mother told me, he wept at night, in his sleep. He wept in his sleep for four years."
John Bradley never considered himself a hero, Betty said. Least of all for having lent a hand in raising a flag.
"He felt that they were making a hero out of these boys who put a pole in the ground," Betty said. "And he saw men that really were heroes. Another thing, he won the Navy Cross, but in order to get a medal like that, an officer has to see the act to do something. Well, my husband saw fellows doing things that they didn't get credit for, so he didn't believe in medals, he didn't put much value on medals."
John Bradley was so intensely reluctant to talk about his war experience that it's family lore how invariably when some member of the press came calling, John always would be "fishing in Canada."
"The real story, as Dad saw it, was simple and unadorned: A flag needed to be replaced. The pole was heavy. The sun was just right. A chance shot turned an unremarkable act into a remarkable photograph.
"… The Photograph represented something private to him, something he could never put into words. It didn't represent any abstraction such as 'valor' or 'the American fighting spirit.' Probably it represented Mike, Harlon, Ira, Franklin, and Rene, and the other boys who fought alongside him on Iwo Jima, boys whose lives he'd saved or tried to save. He never disparaged The Photograph. He just never said anything about it …
Betty said that over the years she urged her husband to talk about the flag-raising if only for the sake of their grandchildren.
"When the Public Broadcasting television men asked to interview him … they said how it would be done in a dignified manner and this and that, and I said to him, 'Why don't you do this one thing. You never have told your grandchildren about the flag-raising, but if you'd just go for this one interview, they could have that.'"
John acquiesced.
"During that interview, he kept deflecting attention from himself onto the men that he thought were the real heroes. And to think that all those men died there," Betty said. "Finally, the interviewer said to him, 'From what you know now, if you had the opportunity would you jump in and help the men raise the flagpole again?' He thought for a minute and he said, 'No, sir, I don't think I would.'"
"Hero. In that misunderstood and corrupted word, I think, lay the final reason for John Bradley's silence. Today the word 'hero' has been diminished, confused with 'celebrity.' But in my father's generation the word meant something.
"… The irony, of course, is that Doc Bradley was indeed a hero on Iwo Jima — many times over. The flagraising, in fact, might be seen as one of the few moments in which he was not acting heroically. … So he knew real heroism. He could separate the real thing from the image, the fluff. And no matter how many millions of people thought otherwise, he understood that this image of heroism was not the real thing."
Certainly, Betty hopes the movie is successful. But more than that she hopes young people who are considering enlisting will see it. This movie and any other movie that presents the unvarnished truth, that war really is hell.
"I'm happy for any war stories," Betty said. "When the recruiters get a hold of these young kids and tell them about the glory of the war and the beautiful uniforms they're going to wear and how they will be respected, the kids join up. Movies like 'Saving Private Ryan,' I think these young kids should all see that and their parents should, too. And this movie, too. They should know what war really is before they sign up."
When Antigo hosts a premiere on Wednesday for "Flags of Our Fathers," most of the Bradleys plan to be there to watch it together. When the movie officially opens Friday, the group plans to watch it together with Betty in Wausau.
"Our plan is for as many of us as we can to get together and go see it and then either go out or go to one of the homes and talk about it," Betty said.
"So I will take my dad's word for it: Mike, Harlon, Franklin, Ira, Rene and Doc, the men of Easy Company — they just did what anybody would have done, and they were not heroes. Not heroes.
"They were boys of common virtue. Called to duty. Brothers and sons. Friends and neighbors. And fathers.
"It's as simple as that."
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| 15th October 2006 01:23 PM |
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| glencar |
On the flight to Chicago I sat next to an 80-year-old Marine. He was headed for a reunion with his buddies that they hold every year around the country around October. He joked about how every year there's one or two gone. He seemed like a really good guy who was a real pleasure to sit next to. |
| 16th October 2006 12:32 PM |
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| nankerphelge |
I am looking forward to this flick as my dad fought on Iwo with the Marines!
Whole lotta ugly! |
| 16th October 2006 03:09 PM |
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| pdog |
Is anyone besides me trying to reconcile Starbucks love for war movies and his hate for guns and killing? |
| 16th October 2006 03:11 PM |
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| TampabayStone |
quote:
pdog wrote:
Is anyone besides me trying to reconcile Starbucks love for war movies and his hate for guns and killing?
He loves BSG. Best show on TV.
TBS (the real one) |
| 16th October 2006 03:35 PM |
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| jb |
I saw 'The marine" this weekend...2 very hot chicks were in it. |
| 16th October 2006 03:47 PM |
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| Joey |
quote:
mojoman wrote:
my dad was in the navy during WWII and occupied japan after the war. he never spoke at all about his experiences in the pacific island campaigns. i only heard about it from his peers and that was only very little. i believe the stuff they saw was just to dark to tell. that and they felt that they just did their duty and were lucky to have made it back alive when so many others didn't.
The stuff they saw is probably better left unsaid ......
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| 16th October 2006 04:19 PM |
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| Chuck |
Inside the Hero Factory
Clint Eastwood's 'Flags of Our Fathers' asks hard questions about the way governments sell our wars.
By David Ansen
Newsweek
Oct. 23, 2006 issue - Clint Eastwood's tough, smart, achingly sad "Flags of Our Fathers" is about three anointed heroes of World War II—three of the men who appeared, backs to the camera, in the legendary Joe Rosenthal photograph of six soldiers hoisting the American flag on Iwo Jima. It was an image that electrified a nation at war. The military wanted these men to be larger than life to raise desperately needed money for the war effort by selling war bonds. So the government, sensing, as one character says in Eastwood's film, "that a picture can win or lose a war," plucked them off Iwo Jima, where the 35-day battle was still raging (and where the other three men in the photo had been killed), and paraded them in front of cheering crowds. It was all for a good cause, but it was pure PR, and it ate away at the insides of these media-proclaimed heroes, who believed that the men who deserved the glory were the ones who had given their lives.
Watching Eastwood's harrowing film, which raises pointed questions about how heroes, and wars, are packaged and sold, it's hard not to think his movie is a commentary on today. Images of Jessica Lynch pop into your brain. And when Sgt. Mike Strank (Barry Pepper), the unit's leader, is killed by friendly fire, your thoughts turn to Pat Tillman, the ex-football star whose death was initially rewritten to suit the mythical role the military, and the media, had decided he must play. "When people ask me if this movie is applicable to today," Eastwood told NEWSWEEK, "I say, 'Well, you know, everything is ... Everyone's distorting things, just as they distorted them then'."
Eastwood wasn't thinking about Lynch when he re-created Iwo Jima's brutal battles on the black sands of Iceland, but he acknowledges the aptness of the analogy. "That poor girl. She was just a teenager. The military and their publicity people decided she had to be Wonder Woman, gunning down tons of people with her machine gun, when she didn't fire a shot. They desperately wanted her to be that." Eastwood, the former Republican mayor of Carmel, Calif., is no dove, but he does question the premise behind the American undertaking in the Middle East. "I'm not one of those idealistic people who think democracy has to be for everyone," he says. "That's naive on our part. I don't know if they want democracy."
"Flags of Our Fathers," an epic both raw and contemplative, is neither a flag-waving war movie nor a debunking. It's an investigation into the nature of heroism, real and manufactured, and of our deep-seated need to avert our eyes from the horror of war by gazing up at the more comforting vision of the heroic. It ponders the way images are used to manipulate reality. (Eastwood's "Letters From Iwo Jima," which will be released in February, follows the Japanese side of the battle—largely in Japanese, with subtitles.) Working from an intricately structured screenplay by Paul Haggis and William Broyles, Eastwood crosscuts between the present, where the survivors are still haunted by the war's deadliest fight, to the battle for Iwo Jima itself, where more than 20,000 Japanese and 6,821 Americans died, to the banquet halls and football stadiums where Navy Corpsman John (Doc) Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), 19-year-old Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Native American Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) are wined, dined, celebrated—and ultimately discarded.
(clip)
Full: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264215/site/newsweek
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