I'm a fan of Errol Flynn in general, and I'm not averse to war films either; but I simply couldn't warm to this one. It's not just the propaganda angle (although sixty years later, "Objective Burma" has still to live down the scandal caused by its initial British release -- it was the first thing mentioned in the two-line film summary provided by the daily TV schedules): I found it a strangely cursory experience. If this, as I've read, is the best of Flynn's American war movies, then those more poorly regarded must be mere flag-wavers indeed.
Overall... 'hollow', I think, is the word that comes to mind. Ironically enough, the characters have it too easy. There's nothing there.
As a leader, Flynn never has to make any really tough decisions, morally speaking -- every time a dilemma comes up, circumstances (or rather the script-writers) solve it for him. He is never forced to abandon a badly wounded man to save the lives of the rest: the one hurt in the escape from the village conveniently dies within minutes, the survivor from the other party miraculously gets back on his feet after a portable blood transfusion(!) His injured second-in-command begs him to shoot him, then happens to expire of his own accord before he has to do anything about it... it got pretty noticeable after a while. For example, the pilot is due to be told to stop searching for Nelson and his group, but we never see his reaction to this order, and in the event he happens to come across them anyway. Nobody is seen to suffer the choice -- so frequent in most wartime scenarios as to be almost a cliché -- between doing what is required of him, and doing what immediate instinct tells him is right.
We are told that the Japanese are brutally horrible to their prisoners, but we never have any idea as to *how* -- I mean, obviously they're not going to show pictures of tortured bodies and I certainly wouldn't want to see them, but the squeaky-clean absence of *any* hint as to what they are supposed to be talking about is a cop-out that, again, is far too obvious. You can't just say that people are wicked and cruel and expect the audience to take you on trust... Compare that to something like "Bridge on the River Kwai" (which doesn't, to the best of my recollection, show any actual graphic abuse either -- and holds the same PG certificate as "Objective Burma!") or even "In Which We Serve", where the enemy are seen machine-gunning the wreck survivors (unfortunately true), or the Japanese treatment of civilians and prisoners in "A Town Like Alice", and you only end up doubling the impression that this is comic-strip stuff.
Next problem: the characters are pretty much interchangeable. You have very little sense of any of the soldiers as individuals; the only ones who get any sort of characterisation are the newspaperman, and the young lieutenant who gets killed pretty early on. I don't except Flynn from this -- I have to say that I can't see much trace of the humanity, depth and elder-brotherly affection that Thomas McNulty's book, for one, hymns so eloquently here. Captain Nelson is a cipher to me, with none of Flynn's swashbuckling charisma, no distinctive personality, and no sign of any hidden depths. Hard to picture him as an architect in civilian life. And there were no recognisable Flynn-moments that I could see, with the exception of the final shot where he turns and looks back before climbing into the glider... and had obviously been instructed to put on some kind of Meaningful Expression, but picks the wrong one and ends up doing his 'oops it wasn't me' face!
Good sections: well, the beginning, of course, is pure propaganda, the would-be comedy of the 'briefing in an hour' is pretty flat, but the part in the aeroplane before the parachute jump was actively good. That was one of the few parts that in practice I found emotionally effective; it's an excellent build-up of tension, and I was actually scared by the time that they came to make the jump, despite the fact that in the event nothing happens! Probably Flynn's best scenes as well, where you can see that his words have obviously got more than just face value. The other bit that worked for me was the night attack, where the Japanese soldier crawls into the trench pretending to be an American; I cottoned on to what was going on at just about the right moment for maximum tension, i.e. a few seconds before the characters did :-)
Overall as a war movie, I'd rank it about level with "We Dive at Dawn" -- or a little below. There are probably contemporary British propaganda flicks churned out to schedule with equal lack of merit, but I tend not to watch that kind of thing when left to my own devices, and I certainly wouldn't say this was an outstanding vehicle for Flynn: it's the sort of picture that got him the reputation for preferring phony Hollywood heroics to actually enlisting. I've seen good war films -- I've named a selection above. This isn't one of them, and although I confidently expect to be condemned for the opinion, I honestly can't see what so many people see in it.
Overall... 'hollow', I think, is the word that comes to mind. Ironically enough, the characters have it too easy. There's nothing there.
As a leader, Flynn never has to make any really tough decisions, morally speaking -- every time a dilemma comes up, circumstances (or rather the script-writers) solve it for him. He is never forced to abandon a badly wounded man to save the lives of the rest: the one hurt in the escape from the village conveniently dies within minutes, the survivor from the other party miraculously gets back on his feet after a portable blood transfusion(!) His injured second-in-command begs him to shoot him, then happens to expire of his own accord before he has to do anything about it... it got pretty noticeable after a while. For example, the pilot is due to be told to stop searching for Nelson and his group, but we never see his reaction to this order, and in the event he happens to come across them anyway. Nobody is seen to suffer the choice -- so frequent in most wartime scenarios as to be almost a cliché -- between doing what is required of him, and doing what immediate instinct tells him is right.
We are told that the Japanese are brutally horrible to their prisoners, but we never have any idea as to *how* -- I mean, obviously they're not going to show pictures of tortured bodies and I certainly wouldn't want to see them, but the squeaky-clean absence of *any* hint as to what they are supposed to be talking about is a cop-out that, again, is far too obvious. You can't just say that people are wicked and cruel and expect the audience to take you on trust... Compare that to something like "Bridge on the River Kwai" (which doesn't, to the best of my recollection, show any actual graphic abuse either -- and holds the same PG certificate as "Objective Burma!") or even "In Which We Serve", where the enemy are seen machine-gunning the wreck survivors (unfortunately true), or the Japanese treatment of civilians and prisoners in "A Town Like Alice", and you only end up doubling the impression that this is comic-strip stuff.
Next problem: the characters are pretty much interchangeable. You have very little sense of any of the soldiers as individuals; the only ones who get any sort of characterisation are the newspaperman, and the young lieutenant who gets killed pretty early on. I don't except Flynn from this -- I have to say that I can't see much trace of the humanity, depth and elder-brotherly affection that Thomas McNulty's book, for one, hymns so eloquently here. Captain Nelson is a cipher to me, with none of Flynn's swashbuckling charisma, no distinctive personality, and no sign of any hidden depths. Hard to picture him as an architect in civilian life. And there were no recognisable Flynn-moments that I could see, with the exception of the final shot where he turns and looks back before climbing into the glider... and had obviously been instructed to put on some kind of Meaningful Expression, but picks the wrong one and ends up doing his 'oops it wasn't me' face!
Good sections: well, the beginning, of course, is pure propaganda, the would-be comedy of the 'briefing in an hour' is pretty flat, but the part in the aeroplane before the parachute jump was actively good. That was one of the few parts that in practice I found emotionally effective; it's an excellent build-up of tension, and I was actually scared by the time that they came to make the jump, despite the fact that in the event nothing happens! Probably Flynn's best scenes as well, where you can see that his words have obviously got more than just face value. The other bit that worked for me was the night attack, where the Japanese soldier crawls into the trench pretending to be an American; I cottoned on to what was going on at just about the right moment for maximum tension, i.e. a few seconds before the characters did :-)
Overall as a war movie, I'd rank it about level with "We Dive at Dawn" -- or a little below. There are probably contemporary British propaganda flicks churned out to schedule with equal lack of merit, but I tend not to watch that kind of thing when left to my own devices, and I certainly wouldn't say this was an outstanding vehicle for Flynn: it's the sort of picture that got him the reputation for preferring phony Hollywood heroics to actually enlisting. I've seen good war films -- I've named a selection above. This isn't one of them, and although I confidently expect to be condemned for the opinion, I honestly can't see what so many people see in it.