The Red Badge of Courage (MGM, 1951)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 25) my husband Charles and I watched two films from Turner Classic Movies’ three-day Memorial Day weekend marathon of war films. They were both movies I’d seen before, but not for many years. The first was The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s classic novel of both cowardice and courage in the Civil War. I haven’t read The Red Badge of Courage since junior high school and I hadn’t seen the movie since I ran it for Charles on a home-recorded videotape in the late 1990’s. The Red Badge of Courage has gone down in history alongside such similarly butchered films as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), John Ford’s Three Bad Men (1926), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Huston considered the original two-hour director’s cut the best film he’d made to that point, but as part of the turmoil that gripped MGM when Louis B. Mayer was fired in 1951 and Dore Schary took over as head of production, it was given various cut-down edits until the final release version was only 69 minutes. John Huston was unable to fight back because he was already in Africa making The African Queen (a mirror image of how Orson Welles lost control of Ambersons by flying off to South America for his never-finished documentary It’s All True). Oddly, The Red Badge of Courage as it stands now is a powerful and totally engaging cinematic parable of war and what it does to the psyches of the people – especially the “grunts” on the ground – who have to fight it. Huston chose mostly unknown or barely known actors for the roles, and he gave the leads to two real World War II veterans who’d never made movies before: Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated war hero in the war, and Bill Mauldin, a cartoonist whose bedraggled, unshaven characters “Willie” and “Joe” communicated what being an infantryman in World War II was really like. (Later Murphy would become at least a minor star in Universal Westerns, and would also play himself in a film of his autobiography. To Hell and Back.)

Huston was one of those filmmakers who actually left the industry during the war to enlist in the U.S. Signal Corps and make on-the-spot documentaries of actual combats, notably The Battle of San Pietro (1942). I couldn’t help but think of the anecdote that when Huston completed San Pietro and showed it to his commanding officers, one of them said, “You’ve made an anti-war movie!” Huston replied, “If I ever make a movie about war that isn’t an anti-war movie, you can take me out and shoot me.” Certainly The Red Badge of Courage (the title is a reference to one’s first war wound) is an anti-war movie, and Huston’s approach to shooting fictionalized battles was informed by his wartime experience filming real ones. Both Huston and Murphy tried to buy back the film from MGM to restore his original cut, but they were told that the negative had been destroyed. One Huston biographer said he’d actually gotten a 16 mm print of his version, but he’d lost it on one of his many travels. Huston told that writer, Lawrence Grobel, that it didn’t much matter to him because he’d made so many films and he’d written off The Red Badge of Courage as a flop between two major hits, The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and The African Queen (1952). Huston (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Albert Band, both of whom also played parts in the film) and his no-name cast do such a good job establishing verisimilitude that when we momentarily do encounter a familiar face (and an even more familiar voice), Andy Devine as “The Cheery Soldier,” we’re jarred back to the usual experience of watching a movie. The familiar story of a young man who deserts during his first battle, falls in with a line of wounded soldiers who ask him what his wound is, and then has a chance to redeem himself the next day in another all-out engagement is well told and suffers from none of the lacunae that usually afflict massively edited films. Indeed, I think one could make a case that a longer The Red Badge of Courage wouldn’t necessarily be a better one – just as when I read that the original rough cut of The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup was two hours long and the version we have is just 70 minutes, I thought that a longer Duck Soup might have been a batch of great comedy scenes with a lot of boring stuff in between (like all too many of The Marx Brothers’ later movies), while the Duck Soup we have is a batch of great comedy scenes with nothing in between.