They Were Expendable (1945)

People are voting emotionally.

Load of rubbish!!

Awesome Movie

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Lt. John Bulkeley was the PT commander who, against great odds, evacuated MacArthur (on orders from the President) and his family from the Philippines before the surrender in 42. A decent film with a good cast and usual fine directing from John Ford, it's worth seeing for the military enthusiast, just for the PT Boats!

Although this film was made more than 60 years ago, it is in my opinion the best war film ever made. It 's dramatic understatement is brilliant film-making. Notice how often characters are allowed to move away from the camera and have a conversation that you are not privileged to listen to. It's a pity today's directors don't use this technique to create tension and mystery. It also portrays a world that has almost vanished in just one lifetime. Notice how in the early bar scene of the enlisted men and non-Com's, the youngest sailors are only allowed to drink a small beer or milk! Self sacrifice and duty permeate the whole film. The scene when General McArthy leaves the Phillapines is particularly stirring. I cannot recommend this film highly enough!

This movie is fairly accurate for what happened back then. Robert Montgomery plays the PT boat commander and is an actual serviceman from the war. John Wayne is his exec, a little bit hyper and inexperienced. The Pt boats are used basically as messenger boats by the brass. they just don't understand how to use them properly. As the movie progresses the crew is eventually beached and must go their separate ways. They do try to get the boat fixed at a remote facility run by an old man. As the Japs close in you can hear some gunfire but don't see what happens. At the end John Wayne and Robert Montgomery both get out on the last plane out of the area because of their PT boat experiences.

They Were Expendable (1945)Start with some perspective, in the months just after World War Two has ended. John Ford, the director, was by now widely recognized as one of America's greatest. After years of smaller successes, he hit it big with "Grapes of Wrath" and "Young Mr. Lincoln" right before the war. And in "Stagecoach" (1939) he helped revive the Western, and John Wayne's faltering career. By 1945 John Wayne was known for his sturdy, no-nonsense common sense approach to life, and love.Both men were the kind of Republican that meant individual freedom and self-reliance as much as patriotism (and not the Reagan style moralizing Republican). It is the rugged self-made-man sense that works to well here, because now John Wayne is in the military, the navy, just as the Japanese are invading (successfully) the Philippines. And in the military you have to follow orders. When Wayne wants to stay behind for love, and push on for military glory, he is forced to change his mind.Not that the men don't have individual traits. They do, in that great John Ford fashion, building up believable types in a group of characters. And the other lead, the main lead in fact (who directed part of the film when Ford was ill), is Robert Montgomery. Montgomery was a leading man of a different kind than Wayne, famous not for Westerns and war films, but everyday dramas and comedies. And he had been an actual PT boat commander in the war, and knew something about it that was irreplaceable.In fact, the film is remarkable for its verisimilitude--its convincingness, in both the broad sweep (the advance of the Japanese) and the details (all the things that make a movie make sense without distraction). While filmed in Florida, it looks completely like the Philippines, and the boats and planes (American planes, all of them--the great Mitsubishi Zero planes that wreaked havoc in the first year of the war were mostly destroyed) are real. The battle scenes as much as the straw hut barracks scenes are all believable, as much as Hollywood can pull off. There are times when you see the PT boats pushing toward a Japanese ship and a hundred shells hit within feet of the boat but never strike, and you it seems like terribly good luck, but I think the fear and the sense of probably death are what matters most.And survival. The title of the movie is actual a daring one, because it reminds viewers, many still straggling in from the theater of war to the hometown movie theater, that the war was brutal. And that meant that horrifying decisions were made, or were made for the troops because of circumstance. That is, as the Japanese swept across the Philippine islands, the withdrawal of American troops was incomplete and disorganized. Not only were many men sent to battle with little chance of winning, many others were simply left behind. It is frankly the kind of warfare we might not tolerate any longer--or that might make warmongers of many of us who proclaim peace above everything in relative peacetime. It does, also, make you see what a different, controlled kind of wars the mideast wars are, with casualties and bravery, but overall a sense of measured risk and step by step planning, backwards or forwards.Honestly, I'm not a war film fan. But I love good movies, and this is a good movie. It feels a little long by the time you hit two hours, but it never resorts to sentimentalism for its own sake. Many of the character actors (side actors) are terrific, including Donna Reed in a Donna Reedesque role (the sweet pretty girl who is just slightly unattainable). Wayne is in great form, I think, a carryover from "Stagecoach" but in a new universe. And Montgomery in his quiet way is admirably strong and central to making these troops, and the movie, proceed with determination.