Report from the Aleutians

 

Army Captain John Huston

REPORT FROM THE ALEUTIANS                       B                                                               USA  (47 mi)  1943  d: John Huston

Since there’s a Middle East war going on at the moment, maybe we should take a look back at one of America’s greatest film directors, John Huston, making a World War II-era documentary about life among American soldiers protecting Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as they prepare for combat, made while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, a film he narrates from a first-person perspective with assistance from his father Walter Huston, editing it himself, occasionally accompanied by a Dimitri Tiomkin score, nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.  Unlike many wartime films glorifying combat, this prioritizes the monotony and endurance required in this remote, fog-bound theater, where soldiers faced constant dampness, mud, and isolation, a quiet and contemplative film that focuses on the everyday lives of soldiers, prioritizing operational realism, offering a unique and intimate perspective on the war, the first of four documentary films Huston made while serving in the army, having already made WINNING YOUR WINGS (1942), a recruitment film for the Army Air Forces hosted by Jimmy Stewart, following this film with THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO (1945), revealing the failures of America’s intelligence agencies that led to alarming deaths, which the War Department rejected because it was perceived as promoting an anti-war message, believing it would be “demoralizing to men who were going into combat for the first time.”  Having been subjected to perpetual German artillery shelling and prolonged aerial bombing operations during the filming, Huston would experience reoccurring nightmares and psychological distress, which led him to make his most personal war documentary, LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946), among the first films to examine the effects of war and post-traumatic stress, which was censored for 35 years, until 1981.  After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hollywood studio executives, directors, actors, and film industry professionals either volunteered or accepted commissions to enlist in the armed forces to help rally public support for the war effort.   Around that same time, director John Ford made THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942), an 18-minute short filming the Japanese aerial assault of Midway Island as it happened, a montage of battle footage and voiceover narrators, the first and most influential of the government-sponsored combat reports, which resulted in two 16mm cameras destroyed and the director wounded, one of four films to win an Academy Award in the inaugural year for Documentary Feature.  The Office of War Information (OWI) was less pleased with the Huston documentaries, finding them more problematic, often placing veterans in a less than flattering light, where the faded images and sound quality of this film feel crudely raw, reflective of the difficulties involved with the equipment. 

Huston’s second documentary for the war effort is a record of the construction of an air base on the barren Adak Island in the Aleutians, consisting of more than 200 islands in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, stretching over 1,200 miles toward Russia, where this chain includes 57 volcanoes and features what may be the foggiest, rainiest, and windiest weather in the United States, with no trees to speak of on the islands and very little brush, with soft, spongy tundra making maneuvering difficult, as vehicles would sink into the water-logged, volcanic soil, providing enormous tactical and logistic difficulty for those assigned there.  Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, perhaps hoping to divert attention away from Midway, the Japanese carrier-based aircraft attacked Dutch Harbor on Amaknak Island in the Aleutians for two days in June 1942, establishing military garrisons on the islands of Attu and Kiska, taking the few inhabitants as prisoners, though this assault may have actually intended to complement the Midway operation, with the purpose of setting the conditions for a Japanese occupation of the Aleutian Islands, which in turn was to prevent the United States from using them as a base to attack Japan from the north, as Adak Island is closer to Japan than any other American outpost.  To this day, it remains one of the few sites in the United States to be subjected to an aerial bombardment by a foreign power.  For various reasons, the Aleutians campaign, which continued into the summer of 1943, has remained obscure in comparison to the Guadalcanal campaign and the Allied landings in North Africa, part of which is due to the utter geographic remoteness of the area and the extremely hostile weather conditions, and also because both the United States and Japan deployed only the minimal forces necessary in comparison with other theaters of operation, where the fifteen-month struggle is often referred to as the “Forgotten War.”  It is, however, the only campaign that included ground combat on American soil in the Western Hemisphere in World War II.  With Huston spending 6 months on the island with the troops, the campaign in the Aleutians was characterized by an uneven pace of sea and air actions, dependent as much on weather conditions as on available forces, with the film depicting the down time contending with the everpresent snow, mud, and rain, striking for its banality, featuring unglamorous depictions of base life, including drab images of latrine cleaning and mess hall meals, with troops besieged by boredom, as there is literally nothing for miles due to the extreme isolation.  Yet it also shows the indomitable spirit and heroic effort involved in preparing for the attack on Japanese-occupied Kiska and Attu Islands, made before the August 1943 invasion, which was a joint American/Canadian effort, punctuated by occasional bombing raid rehearsals, with actual B-17 and B-24 bombing raid footage seen at the end of the film.    

Having already made an important Hollywood film, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), Huston, along with John Ford, William Wyler, and Frank Capra were called upon to document the developing conflict.  The film was shot in Technicolor on 16mm by Huston, Rey Scott, and four others during the fall and winter of 1942, compiling footage obtained by different members of the unit on fifteen different flight missions, suffering through the same hazards and hardships experienced by the troops, where it’s impressive to build an airstrip in just 36 hours against formidable odds, as foul weather was a constant issue, with heavy fog and ice enveloping the aircraft, along with fierce wind storms exceeding 100 mph, where it seems impossible to fly in these harsh conditions, grounding aircraft for up to 80% of days.  Weather and the remote terrain may have been more of an obstacle than the Japanese troops awaiting them, as soldiers played cards, grew out their beards, and were forced to survive on meager rations, taking to reading each other’s mail to avoid the tedium, yet were also seen singing and playing music.  Among the more harrowing scenes is a funeral sequence where a pilot shot down was laid to rest, yet the message seems to be in jingoistic support, offering patriotic conviction and optimism, always wanting to project a completely successful mission.  Most of the film stresses the readiness and alertness of the air squadrons, who were called upon to protect a major flank from the advancing Japanese, with Scott going over Kiska targets nine times in six days, while Huston himself had two close brushes with death, one of them during a crash landing, and the other when a 20mm enemy shell struck his aircraft during a mission, fatally wounding the waist gunner beside him.  Coming before the advancement of commercial aircraft, which was largely developed in the 50’s and 60’s, this was happening at a time when flying was still a novelty, where big four-engine, propeller bomber planes were an innovation at the time.  Dwelling extensively on take-offs and landings of smaller fighter planes, which were used in air combat against the Japanese “Zero” planes, it’s important to stress the spectacular nature of aviation, which Huston effortlessly captures, yet the film provoked only a lukewarm response from the small audiences to see it, quickly pulled from movie theaters for revealing a top secret target, perhaps put off by the sorrowful tone and mood of regret that permeates war footage, as so many families are affected.  The Aleutian Islands campaign led to the loss of 1,481 American lives, along with 4,350 Japanese soldiers.  More than 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed in the Pacific theater during the course of the war, compared with the 15 to 20 million killed in Europe, offering us a chance to reflect on so many soldiers who died to protect our free way of life.

Report From The Aleutians - Full Movie | John Huston, Walter ...  Entire movie may be seen on YouTube (46:53)

The Dead

 

Director John Huston

Huston on the set with his son Tony

author James Joyce, 1904

THE DEAD                A                                                                                                            Great Britain  Ireland  USA  (83 mi)  1987  d: John Huston

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, originally written in 1904, with this longer story added in 1907, not published until 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

John Huston began his career as a screenwriter, and one of the obvious strengths of his work is his attention to dialogue, relying heavily upon literary adaptations as a director, where the great majority of his 36 features, and certainly his best-known ones, were drawn from novels, short stories, or plays, with Huston awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Trinity College Dublin.  In his storied career, one need only think of THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), a Dashiell Hammett novel, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), an adventure novel by B. Traven, KEY LARGO (1948), based on a Maxwell Anderson play, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), a W.R. Burnett novel, THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1951), a C.S. Forester novel, MOBY DICK (1956), a Herman Melville novel, The Misfits, (1961), written by playwright Arthur Miller, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), a Rudyard Kipling short story, and WISE BLOOD (1979), a Flannery O’Connor novel, among others, while this last and final film is an adaptation of what is perhaps James Joyce’s most perfect story from Dubliners, a collection of short stories focusing upon a series of characters connected only by the city in which they reside, written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, when a search for a national identity and purpose was paramount, made while he was sitting in a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank, on the verge of his own death (four months after shooting ended), suffering from terminal emphysema, bringing a vividly personalized atmosphere to the set.  Something of a love letter to Ireland and a merging of kindred artistic spirits, the youthful writer and the aging filmmaker, both coming to terms with their impending mortality, each wondering how they would be remembered and what they would leave behind, borrowing several biographical details from Joyce’s life, as both he and Gabriel Conroy reviewed books for the pro-British Dublin Daily Express, taught in college, became Europeanized, and were largely indifferent to the nationalistic aims of their native country.  Heavily impacted by Joyce ever since his mother smuggled him a copy from Paris during the 1920’s of the then-banned novel Ulysses, writing in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, “It was probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me,” actually influencing his decision to move to Ireland in 1952, thoroughly disgusted by the McCarthyist witch hunt spreading through Hollywood at the time, wanting to escape the “moral rot” ruining the lives of many of his friends in the movie industry, eventually becoming an Irish citizen.  Adapted by his son Tony Huston, with an opening dedication “For Maricela,” the director’s longtime nurse and companion Maricela Hernández, this mysteriously complex film also stars his daughter Angelica Huston, who he previously directed in PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985), winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, where the cast is all-Irish except Angelica Huston, but she grew up in Ireland, having moved there when she was just two years old, and doesn’t miss a beat, with most of the cast coming from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company, yet what really stands out is the power of the performances.  Angelica Huston has never been so, well - - angelic, for lack of a better word, as she’s usually typecast as a much tougher person, darker and more imposingly complex, an actress whose strong onscreen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate, yet here she plays Gretta Conroy, the wife of an academic, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), modeled directly after Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle (also serving as Joyce’s role model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses), playing a more minor part than her husband, easily overlooked through most of the story.  While she’s outwardly kind and socially considerate, the picture of etiquette and social grace, the story turns on a dime near the end, where out of nowhere she becomes the central focus, almost by accident, as her actions suddenly influence the mood of the entire story, taking a decidedly melancholy trajectory, where all the banalities of ordinary existence and the much anticipated social pretensions, captured in all its drunken comedy and pathos, must be endured in order to appreciate the full emotional power of such a magnificently realized finale, like a beam of light streaming in opening our eyes to what the story is really driving at, suggesting a love for life can also express itself as a complicated love for the dead, becoming a labor of love so unlike Huston’s earlier films, beautifully blending in to the social setting of the turn-of-the-century era. 

Joyce had a complex relationship with Dublin, and Ireland, leaving the city for good after 1909, and after 1912 he never set foot in Ireland again, moving to Italy and then Paris where he was surrounded by like-minded contemporary writers like Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats, where his reasons were both deeply personal and part of broader societal trends, reflective of what he saw as the spiritual “deadness” of Dublin, while also decrying Irish society’s conservatism, censorship, religious hypocrisy, and zealous nationalism, though his spiritual and artistic engagement with the city continued until the end of his life, while according to Huston, “All I know about filmmaking is in this film.”  Written in 1907 when he was just 25 from an apartment in Trieste, Italy, more than a decade before Ulysses was published in 1922, the film is about memory, loss, and the lasting power of the dead over the living, and while it’s a faithful adaptation, there are additions not included in the original source material, reassigning numerous lines to different characters, while also introducing an entirely new character in Mr. Grace (Seán McClory), who eloquently recites an English translation of an 8th-century Middle Irish poem Donal Óg.  Taking place in Dublin in 1904, a Feast of the Epiphany dinner party, held every year 11 days after Christmas, is hosted by two spinster sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany), and their unmarried niece, Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie), all music teachers, as horse-drawn carriages arrive with formally-dressed guests on the snowy night, where we learn that for years the sisters have functioned as the official center of the city’s cultural world.  While Joyce’s writing provides access to Gabriel’s internal, stream-of-consciousness perspective, including his rapidly shifting observations, memories, and emotional responses, a vantage point that is practically impossible to replicate on the screen, instead Huston fluctuates between newly arriving guests, a joyous occasion seamlessly shifting the perspectives, expressing a range of disagreements among the guests, often confronted with uneasy realities, where it’s easy to get swept away by the accumulative power of the experience, yet it’s also hard not to admire his purely cinematic adaptation for its faithfulness to the time period through lighting, costumes, music, and such eloquent diction, where the acute eye for detail is impressive.  Shot by Fred Murphy, it looks utterly spectacular.  Gabriel is sarcastically teased by the fiery temperament of Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), an Irish nationalist colleague who berates him for writing for The Daily Express, which she refers to as an “English rag,” suggesting he should be ashamed of himself for betraying his Irish identity, calling him a “West Briton,” “someone who looks to England for our salvation instead of depending on ourselves alone,” a reference to the political slogan of Sinn Féin, as she leaves the party early, stomping off to attend a Republican meeting.  Over the course of the festive dinner party, where guests discuss topics of musical and local interest, Mr. Browne (Dan O’Herlihy) arrives with flowers which he likens to the gifts of the Magi (which does not appear in the Joyce story), featuring plenty of music and dancing, with the men hovering around a table in the next room with the drinks, some overzealously, as guests find themselves haunted by spectral figures of an older, near-forgotten Dublin, what Huston’s friend Orson Welles characterized as a “myth of the past.”  Yet Joyce was a literary realist, depicting the sensory texture of thought and feeling, where that consciousness constitutes the essence of human life, yet the past may continually push and prod its way into the present, or may leap into our thoughts at any time, and while the characters may be prone to nostalgia, the story is not.  The festive dancing sequences mirror equally enthralling scenes in a Jane Austen novel, as they are everpresent, with audiences watching the action from behind the camera.  When the dancing subsides, Mary Grace plays a virtuosic showpiece on the piano while Aunt Julie performs a Bellini aria for the guests, though her singing voice has clearly diminished with age, as the camera peers through back rooms filled with memorabilia, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life, while Mr. Grace reads an extraordinary recitation about a girl whose life is ruined by her passionate love for a man who promised her things he failed to deliver, only to abandon her, as if in the absence of God, Broken Vows [The Dead (John Huston, 1987)] YouTube (3:38).  While Gretta says nothing, the camera lingers on her placid countenance, thinking something only to herself, where it makes you wonder about the poem’s effect on her.     

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! 

Mirroring those internalized, personal reflections, the conversation turns to whatever happened to the many great operatic tenors that once flourished in Dublin, lamenting that so few are like them today, turning to the tableside expert in the matter, Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson), a celebrated tenor with a sizeable reputation.  While the name Caruso is mentioned, Aunt Kate recalls someone from her youth by the name of Parkinson, a name no one else recalls, yet just thinking about him stirs something inside, her eyes glistening in tears, with the camera holding on her face in close-up.  This is the magic of memory, where the long-dead continue to live inside, haunting us in ways that nothing else can.  As the guests begin to leave, politely exchanging pleasantries, Gretta gets halfway down the stairs before she pauses, struck by what she hears, as the tenor D’Arcy is singing The Lass of Aughrim offscreen, an Irish variant of a Scottish ballad, a song that shifts back and forth between two former lovers lamenting the failings in their relationship, accentuating the imperfections and fragility of human love which lead to heartbreak and to untimely death, sending her into a prayer-like trance, framed by a stained-glass window, immaculately dressed like the Virgin Mary, with a white shawl around her neck and shoulders, representing purity in every sense of the word, The Lass of Aughrim - Frank Patterson YouTube (2:22).  A flood of memories wash over her as she listens intently, while her husband can only imagine what’s captured her attention, frozen in the moment, aware of the “grace and mystery in her attitude.”  Literally the turning point of the film, the music and storytelling of the evening awaken such intense memories, yet the couple says nothing on the carriage ride back to their hotel.  Only then, with Gabriel having hopes of getting amorous, does she finally break into tears, recalling a tragic childhood romance with a young man named Michael Furey in Galway, who used to sing that song to her, feeling responsible for his death at the age of 17, as he died under the window of her room.  “He was very delicate,” she says, revealing to her husband that Michael was very sick, but left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye before she returned to Dublin, dying a week later, confessing “‘I think he died for me.”  The song opened up the floodgates of the pain that she had long repressed, serving as a catalyst which motivates her to remember something so clearly from her past, and while she clearly loves Gabriel and calls him “a very generous person,” she knows that he has never sacrificially given of himself in the way that Michael did for her, which only serves to reveal the lack of true intimacy and genuine love binding the Conroys, bringing about an emotional distance between them.  The cathartic final scene of the film leaves audiences to ponder the strange hold of the past over the present, as well as the impenetrable differences of those who are closest to us.  As Greta tearfully falls asleep in the hotel room, Gabriel is left looking out the window at the falling snow enveloped in darkness and utter solitude, struck by an all-embracing epiphany, realizing that he’s been deceiving himself for all these years, as he was neither Gretta’s first love nor her greatest love, helplessly discovering that he is less than who he thought he was.  His mind wanders to the future, imagining sitting around Aunt Julia’s deathbed, contemplating how he’ll be remembered, if at all, where his place in the world feels so impermanent.  “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”  The final lines of voiceover dialogue spoken over orchestral refrains from The Lass of Aughrim encapsulate his severe desolation and loneliness, questioning his entire life again, reflecting on his existential existence and what it means to be alive before turning into shadows in one of the most profoundly stirring passages in all of literature, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:15), a fitting epitaph for Huston, where it’s hard not to be affected by the extreme intensity and literary potency of the language, mirroring Molly Bloom’s infamous stream-of-conscious soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.  A second camera operator, Scottish Michael Coulter, captures the mesmerizingly beautiful snowy landscapes, where the snow is a metaphor for the vast wasteland and hopelessness experienced by Joyce during the time period, looking out into the uncertainty of his country’s future, while Alex North’s elegiac Celtic harp music plays over both the opening and the end credits.

Watch The Dead Full Movie Online Free With English Subtitles  FShare TV (1:23:10)