Gung Ho!: The Story of Carlson’s Makin Island Raiders is not the 1986 comedy starring Michael Keaton—it’s kind of the opposite of it, really. While that film calls for increased cooperation and understanding between the American and Japanese cultures, the 1943 film is little more focused on wiping all dirty Japs off the face of the earth. If you found the preceding sentence offensive, you will probably find this film objectionable. It’s more than a little bloodthirsty and anti-Japanese.
It is a propaganda film based on accounts of The Makin Island Raid. It is fictionalized, including not having the Carlson in the title as a character. Randolph Scott (Paris Calling, Corvette K-225) plays Colonel Thornwald, a character clearly based on Evans Fordyce Carlson. Other characters are based on members of the battalion, with at least one character having the historical figure’s name.
If you find hatred of the Japanese off putting, don’t watch this movie. And that’s fine because it’s not all that good anyway. To be fair, it’s not all that bad either. It’s a competent piece of propaganda. There are some well done scenes and parts that are interesting as insights into wartime attitudes, but it is not a particularly entertaining film. It is mainly predictable with cliched combat that features individual heroics instead of things people do in combat.
The only thing not following a formula pretty strictly is Scott’s character, who is oddly open to collaboration for a Lieutenant Colonel. He is obviously based on Carlson, who was a precedent-setting and highly-decorated marine who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee after his death. Carlson clearly was a communist and advocated for techniques he had observed while in China. Here’s his profile in Life in 1943, which begins with an excerpt of a speech Carlson reportedly gave—a speech Scott gives directly into the camera at the end of the movie.
Carlson is fascinating—he made officers eat and sleep under the same conditions as the men, and encouraged discussion among all ranks about how to best meet mission objectives.So Scott’s character is interesting—but not tremendously entertaining; Scott is a little wooden at times. I feel like I should recommend a book about Carlson instead of this movie.
As for the movie, we are introduced to most of the other characters through a series of interviews that are part of the recruitment process for the special battalion. The questions often focus on the recruits’ interest and ability to kill. One character admits in confidence to a murder (okay, maybe it was manslaughter, and he’s from Kentucky, so apparently that makes it alright). Another says, “My brother died at Pearl Harbor—they didn’t find enough of him to bury.” One character is an ordained minister who replies, “I’ll do my duty, sir” after being told “What we need now is killers.”
The scene is capped by a recruit saying, “I just don’t like Japs.” This is one of the primary messages of the film—You shouldn’t like Japs, and you should be prepared to kill them.
There is a predictable training section that also includes a perfectly serviceable love triangle featuring Noah Berry Jr. (Rocky from The Rockford Files!) and some other predictable conflicts. Maybe it focuses more on knives than other training sequences, but it doesn’t stand out.
The best part of the film is when the troops are on submarines on the way to their objective. The scenes use real submarines for external shots, and the interiors feel cramped and claustrophobic, and the filmmakers do not shy away from the anxiety soldiers who may well have never been on a boat before feel as a submarine submerges.
At one point they’re being depth charged by planes (Is that a thing?) and one soldier panics. Fortunately, the old “slap him in the face” trick works, and the soldier apologizes.
But then the officer who slapped him tells the other soldiers, “Don’t anybody call him yellow; it could happen to any of you.” One of the most interesting things I’ve found while watching so many of these movies is how understanding and forgiving many films made during and shortly after the war are to stress and anxiety. This character panics under extreme stress, but he is not to be looked down upon—we are ordered not to look down on him.
After the transfer from the submarines to the boat, the coolest part is over. They land on Makin Island and intermittently battle Japanese soldiers while resolving their internal conflicts. They are certainly not the worst combat scenes I’ve seen filmed during the war. Corregidor (1943) has the worst combat I’ve seen so far, but it will probably tie with a significant number of wartime films with smaller budgets than Gung Ho!
Some dirty Japs are in the trees.
The combat isn’t terrible; it just isn’t anything special. It is all individual heroics—someone runs at a machine gun nest, either gets wounded or doesn’t, and knocks it out with grenades. There are Japanese soldiers in a great many trees, so individuals fire their weapons and kill them. There’s one discussion of squad tactics, but that is followed by one character running at a machine gun nest, yelling some version of “cover me.” No one appears to cover him. No one is firing and maneuvering.
There are plenty of swoon deaths, and most characters don’t seem like they’re in real peril. Some characters we know die, though most of the ones we know are only wounded, so perhaps they are mainly swoon woundings. They claim thirty Marines died in the raid, so they can’t have a ton of the people we know dying. It’s all mechanical and predictable, including resolving the love triangle via heroic sacrifice (see Pearl Harbor).
After daringly foiling the Japanese to a greater extent than the actual raid appeared to, and returning to the submarines with a little less trouble than they apparently had, Scott gives a Big Speech to the camera that Carlson apparently did at some point, giving the audience a big, stirring propaganda ending that left me unstirred.
Scott giving the Big Speech right to the camera–it’s 1943; live with it.
Recommendation
This is a wartime propaganda film and not the best one. It’s serviceable, has one interesting character and a sometimes tense and almost always interesting sequence on a submarine. It’s available on Amazon Prime.
I started this project in part because I had recently moved and brought a collection of fifty war movies, Combat Classics, with me, even though I had yet to watch any of them. I am now committed to watching all the World War II related ones and reviewing those worth reviewing. Gung Ho! is in that collection, and probably in its top twenty, in part because it has relatively high production values. There are some very good movies in the collection, but there may be better ways to get those movies that are worthwhile.
One great collection is this five-movie set, Their Finest Hour: 5 British WWII Classics, that I do recommend. Ice Cold in Alex and Went the Day Well? are very good, and many people who are not me think The Dam Busters is a classic. The Colditz Story and Dunkirk are at least okay.