MacArthur (Zanuck-Brown Productions, Universal, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 26) my husband Charles and I watched Universal’s 1977 biopic MacArthur because it’s one of the films for which Intrada Records has released a new version of the soundtrack which I’m reviewing for Fanfare magazine. MacArthur was obviously intended as a follow-up to the blockbuster success of the 1970 biopic Patton. According to Jeff Bond’s liner notes for the Intrada two-CD release, MacArthur was produced by Frank McCarthy, who in 1945 had been an aide to General George C. Marshall and briefly assistant secretary of state. So he almost certainly had known both Patton and MacArthur personally before he went on to make movies about them. Though MacArthur was produced at Universal, it seems like a 20th Century-Fox film in exile because not only was McCarthy a refugee from Fox, so were the executive producers, Richard Zanuck and David Brown. (Zanuck had left Fox in 1971 after his father, studio founder Darryl F. Zanuck, was forced into retirement.) McCarthy’s initial plan for MacArthur was to reunite the star, George C. Scott, and director, Franklin M. Schaffner, from Patton, but Scott turned it down and actually suggested, of all people, Cary Grant for the role. (Scott was quoted in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner as saying that Grant, who’d been retired for a decade by 1977 and hadn’t shown any strong desire to go back to work, was “an aristocrat, just like MacArthur” – which Grant wasn’t; he was a Cockney who had reinvented himself as an actor to play a natural aristocrat with debonair grace.) Other candidates for the lead in MacArthur were Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson (really?), John Gavin, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Charlton Heston, John Wayne and the actor they finally hired, Gregory Peck.

According to Bond, Peck, a well-known Hollywood liberal, was originally skeptical about playing MacArthur – he’d been around when President Harry Truman had fired MacArthur from command in Korea in 1951 and then had supported Truman’s decision – but his attitude turned around when he started reading about MacArthur to research the role. “I decided to learn all sides of him and become his advocate,” Peck told Cue magazine in a 1977 profile timed to promote the movie. “I came to understand how deeply he believed in the old-fashioned values of honor, duty, and country.” In fact, Peck became so strongly supportive of MacArthur it caused the film’s director, Joseph Sargent, problems. “One difficulty we encountered during the filming was that Greg fell so much in love with the character that he resisted doing the negative sides of the man,” Sargent told the Los Angeles Times. McCarthy and Sargent also had problems with Universal in terms of budget constraints, which prevented them from shooting as much of the film as they’d wanted on the original locations. Most of it was shot on the Universal backlot and the beaches of California, though West Point and the now-decommissioned battleship U.S.S. Missouri (site of the September 2, 1945 surrender of Japan that formally ended World War II) did get to play themselves. (Sargent later acknowledged that many of the sites where the film’s events had taken place had been redeveloped so extensively they no longer looked as they had during World War II or the Korean “police action” – a euphemism MacArthur ridicules during the film.)

The film also suffered from budgetary constraints in that its running time was only 2 hours 10 minutes, compared to the 2 hours 52 minutes of Patton, and so the screenwriters, Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, could only show a slice of MacArthur’s life. The film begins when MacArthur has already lost the Battle of the Philippines in 1942 and is ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Dan O’Herlihy, delivering a surprisingly inept performance for such a usually fine actor) to evacuate to Australia, leaving the hapless General Jonathan Wainwright (Sandy Kenyon) to face the inevitable and surrender what was left of the U.S. Army in the Philippines to Japan. (Wainwright spent the remaining three years of the war as a Japanese POW, the highest-ranking U.S. servicemember they captured.) It ends with MacArthur’s dismissal of his command in the Korean War by President Harry S. Truman (Ed Flanders, who had already played Truman in the TV short Harry S. Truman: Plain Speaking and a TV-movie, Truman at Potsdam, and would play him again, though only as a voice actor, in the 1980 film Inchon, also about MacArthur and the Korean War) and his fabled “Old Soldiers Never Die” speech to Congress on his return. A broader portrayal of MacArthur would have included his first appearance as a national celebrity in 1932, when he led the U.S. Army forces to expel the Bonus Marchers (World War I veterans who’d been promised a postwar bonus and marched on Washington to demand it), as well as his rather crabby retirement in which he was often quoted by anti-Viet Nam War protesters as having said the U.S. should never again fight a land war in Asia. It’s not at all clear when – or even if – he said that, though the film makes it clear that MacArthur had no patience with the concept of “limited war” that was at the heart of the American debacle in Viet Nam. To MacArthur, war was something you fought all out, with all of your resources and no quarter given, or not at all.

One gets the impression that McCarthy, Sargent, Barwood, Robbins, and Goldsmith simply didn’t find Douglas MacArthur as interesting a character as they or their artistic counterparts had with George S. Patton. Perhaps because he fell so in love with MacArthur during his researches, Peck portrays him basically as Atticus Finch in uniform. Though there are brief hints of the filmmakers’ ridiculing MacArthur’s affectations, including his insistence that newsreel cameramen always shoot him from low angles so he’ll look taller (a common Hollywood trick that director Billy Wilder and cinematographer John F. Seitz used in Sunset Boulevard to make it look like Gloria Swanson was towering over William Holden even though she was really one foot shorter than he), for the most part MacArthur portrays its central character as an unalloyed hero. At one point he’s declaring, as commander of the U.S. occupying forces in Japan after World War II, that he will insist on Japan enacting land reform programs, allowing women to vote, and making other changes reminiscent of the New Deal. Later in the movie he’s equally insistent on his undying hatred of Communism, and we’re clearly meant to approve of both these contradictory positions. We do get the impression from MacArthur that there was a much stronger and more artistically interesting film of MacArthur’s life than the one we got. For one thing, it doesn’t mention that in addition to MacArthur having a wife (social heiress Louise Closser Brooks), he also had a mistress (Jean Faircloth) who became his second wife in 1937 after Louise divorced him in 1929. (The one actress playing Mrs. MacArthur in the movie, Marj Dusay, looks oddly Asian, which had me wondering if she was a Filipina MacArthur had met on his earlier deployment there in the mid-1920’s.) It also doesn’t mention MacArthur’s desire to use tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War after China joined in 1950. In an interview he gave in 1954 but which was only published after his death a decade later, MacArthur acknowledged that he had requested four atomic bombs for the Korea campaign and asked for sole discretion as to whether and when they would be used. A report published in Time in the 1970’s said MacArthur had not only wanted to use nukes in Korea, he’d asked that the entire boundary between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel be impregnated with radioactive material so it would be literally toxic to pass for thousands of years hence. The Time article claimed that these dangerous and crazy ideas were the real reason President Truman fired him from command in 1951.

MacArthur the movie begins and ends with his farewell speech to West Point in 1962. (Obviously the filmmakers were intent on reproducing the famous opening scene of Patton, which featured George C. Scott’s scorching delivery of a speech given by the real Patton.) There’s a hauntingly ironic scene at the start of MacArthur in which the woman driving him to the ceremony hails the beauties of West Point and asks, “Have you ever been here before, sir?” Of course MacArthur had, many times since his enrollment there in 1899 (he came from a military family and his father, Arthur MacArthur – the MacArthurs always alternated between “Arthur” and “Douglas” as the names for their first-born male children – had won the Medal of Honor for service at Missionary Ridge in the Civil War; when Douglas won it in World War II the MacArthurs became the only father-and-son winners in its history), and in the speech he was there to give, he said, “I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps. I bid you farewell.” (MacArthur’s emphasis on “duty, honor, country” as his living values rings pretty hollow in this era in which the American people have just returned to office a President who believes in none of those things!)