Merrill’s Marauders (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue

Produced by Milton Sperling; directed by Samuel Fuller; screenplay by Samuel Fuller and Milton Sperling, based on The Marauders by Charlton Ogburn; cinematography by William H. Clothier; edited by Folmar Blangsted; music by Howard Jackson; starring Jeff Chandler, John Hoyt, Ty Hardin, Andrew Duggan, Will Hutchins, Claude Akins, and Peter Brown. Blu-ray, color and B&W, 99 min., 1962. A Warner Archive release.

Merrill’s Marauders was the nickname given to the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional) of the U.S. Army, a long range penetration unit active in North Burma during World War II, whose guerrilla mission to take Japanese-controlled Walawbum became another mission, and then another, despite the physical and mental toll it took on a unit that ended with only one hundred out of its original three thousand volunteers on active service, and its leader dead from heart failure. The nickname demonstrates the interest in the unit’s exploits during the war and its aftermath, resulting in widespread media coverage; a critical report on its originator General Stilwell that led to an army investigation and congressional hearings; footage shot by Sergeant David Quaid, rescued from a flooded Burmese ditch and excerpted in subsequent propaganda films; the fictionalized Warner Bros. feature Objective, Burma! (1945), made soon after the unit’s final action at the Siege of Myitkyina; and a plethora of official histories and participant accounts, including the War Department’s Merrill’s Marauders (1945), and communication officer Charlton Ogburn’s The Marauders (1956), with its lurid Expressionist cover of a grim-faced soldier stamped with the blood red insignia of the unit. Samuel Fuller’s adaptation of Ogburn’s book as Merrill’s Marauders was released with an extraordinary trailer narrated by former Marauder and the film’s technical adviser, Lt. Col. Samuel V. Wilson (this disc’s one extra), and a comic-book tie-in.

In short, by the time Fuller came to make Merrill’s Marauders in 1961, the unit’s factual exploits had already been mediated by the circulation of contradictory, ideologically motivated representations, making the possibility of a consolidated or authoritative account of its campaign more remote as the years passed (a possibility further hampered by the loss of many documents; Ogburn doubted that a “whole story” [could] ever be told”). Merrill’s Marauders is itself a patchwork, thanks to the cost-cutting studio and the U.S. Army, whose “cooperation” and imprimatur for “this dramatic re-enactment of an inspiring page from history” featured heavily in the film’s publicity. Fuller initially agreed to the compromises imposed on him by the promise that he would get to film his long-gestating, autobiographical war script The Big Red One. This project would have to gestate for another twenty years when Fuller later protested the distorting changes wrought on Merrill’s Marauders by an army still jealously guarding its image past and present. The worst of these changes are the destruction through clumsy editing and reshooting of a gunfight sequence in Shadazup maze that Fuller filmed in one shot in order to make it impossible to distinguish friend and foe, thereby illustrating the high incidence of friendly fire; and the closing sequence, with a jingoistic montage of military parades muting Fuller’s final shot, the zombie-like stagger of the surviving combatants across a devasted battleground, bitterly culminating a narrative of exhaustion.

If Merrill’s Marauders is a Cold War film—Ogburn in his introduction writes, “We have new enemies today, enemies so menacing we can only wonder how the Empire of Japan…could ever have seemed as dangerous as it did”—it is very much a transitional one. Fuller looks back to the seismic but buried blow to national self-confidence triggered by the Korean War (the setting of Fuller’s earlier Fixed Bayonets! and The Steel Helmet), a war ended by president and former army general Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose domestic rhetoric of affluence and consensus was nagged at by the director in works such as Pickup on South Street and Underworld USA. Conversely, Merrill’s Marauders anticipates the psychic effect of an even more disastrous American incursion into Southeast Asia: the Vietnam War. 

Merrill’s Marauders incorporates material from Quaid and Objective, Burma!, as well as stock footage. It would be worth comparing and contrasting Raoul Walsh’s Objective, Burma! and Merrill’s Marauders in detail, very different war films by very different war veterans. Some of the parallels between Objective, Burma! and Merrill’s Marauders are inevitable given the shared subject matter—long, innovative sequences of boredom and exhaustion as lines of soldiers stumble through disease-ridden jungles, swamps, fogs, and mountains; a subordination of the individual and hierarchy to a kind of collective hero. Some parallels are more unexpected, such as the budding homoerotic relationship between Errol Flynn and a subordinate in Objective, Burma!, flowering into the infatuation between Merrill and Lt. “Stock” Stockton (Ty Hardin) which troubles several members of the company, turning this testosterone-fueled war movie into a thwarted love story.

The contrasts are equally obvious or subtle. Most obvious is the difference between a black-and-white adventure in Academy ratio and a CinemaScope epic in Technicolor, spectacularly reproduced on this Blu-ray—even if Fuller uses color as monochrome khaki and gray instead of black and white. Fuller’s marauders, played by beloved TV stars of the time, are not quite the intractable rebels, cynics, pirates, and murderers Ogburn suspected, but are still far closer to the brutal world of Fuller than the earlier film’s uncomplaining stoics. Flynn as captain in Objective, Burma! is saddened but not traumatized by his unit’s hellish experience, his sense of purpose or faith in ideology remains unaffected. Chandler’s Merrill is introduced as a conflicted and pained figure forced to push his men beyond what is possible, his weak heart emblematic of the unit’s moral and physical decline (Chandler suffered a severe back injury during production and would die at the age of forty-two long before the film’s release, coloring the contemporaneous reception of it). This gives the film an allegorical dimension—already implicit in the film’s “journey” structure—that allows for the astonishing central sequence, during a rest period in a swamp, wherein disaffected soldiers reduced to basic instincts risk slipping down to the level of beasts and even, if not checked, cannibalism. The mood here is close to Charles Laughton’s curdled fairy tale The Night of the Hunter, or Theodore Gericault’s famous painting of stranded sailors, “The Raft of the Medusa.” 

The most far-reaching change Fuller made to his sources was structural. Both Objective, Burma! and The Marauders introduce the main participants at length before the campaign begins, giving thumbnail sketches of their characters that will be developed but ultimately confirmed in the subsequent story. Fuller, one of the great “show not tell” filmmakers, throws his combatants into the action straightaway, in medias res. Character is revealed through action, inaction, and reaction. This gives this historical film, with its well-known story and outcome, a profound existential dimension, and a powerful impression of the present tense. In a letter to his parents from the field, Ogburn wrote “being shelled is like living with the film speeded up.” Merrill’s Marauders, like all of Sam Fuller’s films, is life with the film speeded up.

Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1