Hey, Lucy! (Oops, Wrong Movie): Bataan

Bataan (1943)

This is a World War II movie shot in 1943 showing the Philippines after the Japanese invasion. General Douglas MacArthur is retreating to Corregidor and a small group of volunteers is left behind as a rear guard to fight a delaying action against the Japanese.

Command devolves on tough guy Robert Taylor, the only real veteran of the motley crew of volunteers, who total oddly enough, thirteen. A couple of lieutenants cede command to Taylor, a buck sergeant; one of the officers is a greenhorn, the other an Air Corps pilot with a sick airplane.

Taylor makes his plan. He sees a weakness in the terrain where a deep ravine is spanned by a ramshackle bridge. His demolitions experts take out the bridge and they dig in to prevent the Japanese from restoring the bridge, allowing their vehicles to pursue the Americans and Filipinos retreating with MacArthur. Once the GIs dig in, we have a chance to get to know them and the rest of the movie plays out as a mix of character development and action sequences.

There are thirteen men, altogether, in the rear guard. I'm sure that number is no accident, but a harbinger of the bad juju that is going to come down on the volunteers.

The men consist of a variety of standard types for this sort of film and include three Filipinos (including Desi Arnaz), a sailor (Robert Walker), a black soldier (Kenneth Spencer), and a Jewish soldier, played by of all people veteran character actor Thomas Mitchell (Stagecoach). To add zest to the story, there is also a trouble maker, deliciously played by a malicious Lloyd Nolan (Guadalcanal Diary).

Robert Taylor and Lloyd Nolan have a past, with Nolan being a murderer who escaped and is serving under an assumed name. Taylor was the guard he escaped from and it cost him his chance at OCS. Even so, you can see how bad the situation is that the two guys put aside their differences and cooperate against the enemy who soon is coming against them thick and fast.

The movie is an obvious recruiting effort to gin up patriotism on the home front and spur enlistments but Bataan really was a horrible chapter in the history of the United States. The men who were stationed there were not prepared for a full scale attack by a powerful enemy and their story should be better known today, as their heroic sacrifices were real. The Bataan story and cast presented here was fictional, but only in the sense that it gave a general idea of the living hell these troops were subjected to and perished under.

Robert Taylor, who has always been OK with me, does yeoman service as the tough sergeant who holds the crew together and the line against the ever attacking Japanese. The crew is soon picked off, man by man, and the inevitable end comes down to guess who? Yep, tough sergeant Taylor and the troublemaker Lloyd Nolan.

The movie was shot on a soundstage that stood in for the Philippine jungle and all activity took place in that one set, the site of the ravine where the bridge stood. Action sequences were brutal for 1943 and special effects were good, even if they used miniatures in some obvious places.

The Warner Bros DVD of Bataan is presented in full screen theatrical format, in black and white, and has a running time of 114 minutes, quite long for the era. The video is pristine, with only a very few defects in the master, quite impressive for a sixty year old movie.

More good WWII action movies shot during the war -

Sahara
Crash Dive
Destination Tokyo
Objective, Burma!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV