The Red Badge of Courage
In an extraordinary instance of a film surviving studio butchery with value and a few auteurial vision intact, the pink badge of braveness in its only viewable shape—a studio-mandated sixty nine-minute cut, with director john huston’s very own ninety five-minute version lengthy concept misplaced—can be a comic strip of the director’s authentic reason, but it’s still a large one. An model of stephen crane’s civil battle novel, referred to for its realism, pink badge casts real wwii hero audie murphy as union trooper henry fleming, who flees from his first skirmish simplest to later are seeking for redemption thru recklessness on the battlefield. Huston’s noir-ish touches lend a despairing claustrophobia to an already despairing story; crane’s is a deeply unromantic war story, where proving one’s “braveness” way losing blood, and the herbal instinct to fly from a slaughter is taken into consideration cowardice.
Huston’s longer cut promised extra fleshed-out portrayals of henry’s platoon buddies, but the film in its abbreviated shape may surely be at a bonus: in retaining the alternative characters as ciphers, the movie heightens henry’s isolation and makes an accidental point about the squaddies inside the bloodiest warfare fought on american soil being handled now not as people, but natural, nameless cannon fodder.