User Reviews

Warner Bros. OBJECTIVE BURMA (1945) is one of the best war pictures made during the war about the war. Produced for the studio by Jerry Wald its fine screenplay by Ranald Mac Dougall, and Lester Cole derived from an original story by Alvah Bessie. With crisp and sharp Monochrome cinematography by the great James Wong Howe it was masterfully directed by Raoul Walsh. It also boasted splendid looking Art direction by Ted Smith with the Burmese jungle mock-ups (filmed at the "Lucky" Baldwin ranch near Pasadena in California) not only looking convincingly authentic but with the added sounds of jungle wildlife making it quite daunting too.

The story has Major Nelson (Errol Flynn) and his large contingent of American Paratroopers being dropped into the Burmese jungle behind enemy lines on a secret mission. They must locate and destroy a Japanese radar station. After a successful sneak attack on the station (a good action sequence) the men pull back to their designated pick-up point and wait. Suddenly things go terribly wrong when Japanese ground troops discover where they are after tracking them. Nelson and his men have no alternative but to scurry into the thick jungle to escape and radio for a new pick-up point. But the new rendezvous is 150 miles away. Losing half of the platoon on the journey - because of their forced march through rivers and dense jungle plus tangling with enemy troops - they finally make it to the pick-up point and are rescued.

Although there are the usual stock characterisations - which seems to be endemic in all war movies - performances are generally good. Flynn in particular is excellent! Eschewing his swashbuckling heroic image he turns in a splendid portrayal of a respected commanding officer who is professional and human. In one disturbing moment he expertly manages to bring a deeply effective sense of grief to the scene where he tearfully tries to comfort his dying friend and fellow officer (William Prince). Flynn has rarely been better! OBJECTIVE BURMA was one of the actor's personal favorite pictures and considered it one of his few worthwhile efforts. Good too is Henry Hull as Williams the aging war correspondent who, constantly trying to keep the bright side out, finally succumbs to the pressure of the arduous trek and passes quietly away in his sleep "Gee, I'm awfully sorry Mr. Williams" observes a compassionate James Brown. And watch out for Mark Stevens as the pilot of the B29 in one of his first film appearances under his real name of Stephen Richards.

One of the outstanding aspects of the movie is the marvellous Acadamy Award nominated music by Franz Waxman. The score contains one of the finest march themes ever for a war picture which compliments the early preparation scenes to perfection in its jaunty engaging statement. Then for the Paratroopers jumping from the B29s high pitched strings descend with them as vibrato on the brass simulate the engine noise of the great Bombers. The score is one of the composer's most memorable works and high on the list of Waxman admirers.

OBJECTIVE BURMA hasn't dated at all since it was made sixty five years ago. Unlike many movies of its kind and era it stands up very well today despite starting off on the wrong foot. It was banned in England in 1945 because it omitted to mention any British involvement in Burma. But in 1952 and with a new "apologetic" prologue it was given its long overdue release.

Interestingly, in 1951 the film's basic premise was reused in Warner's Gary Cooper western "Distant Drums".

'Objective Burma' was a highly popular but also highly controversial film and a very good one about the war in Burma. The controversy was that the heroes are American soldiers, (including the Tasmanian Flynn, whose character, Captain Nelson, says he is from Maine - I wonder if he ever met Hawkeye Pierce or Jessica Fletcher), in a theater of war that dominated by the British, Indians and Chinese. Not that the action could not have happened as presented here: the story is based on American General Frank Merrill's 'Marauders', who made a name for themselves fighting in the Burmese jungle. But it angered Winston Churchill and British audiences, who walked out on the film, causing it to be re-released in 1952 with a prologue that made it clear that Lord Mountbatten was running this campaign from India and showed a picture of Ord Wingate, who had been doing the same sort of fighting long before Merrill and his Marauders showed up.

One more thing to think about regarding this controversy: All countries, in making films primarily intended for their domestic audience, are going to feature heroes of their countries. It's just that American films were getting shown all over the world, so these films seem to be emphasizing American heroics at the expense of other nations. Warner Brothers could have made a movie about Ord Wingate but would it have sold as well? And how many American heroes are there in British war films, such as "In Which We Serve", (1942)? Yes there are American heroes in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) and "The Guns of Navarone" (1961) but those were films intended for an international audience, of which the American market was a big part.

The story is relatively simple, although the mission it describes starts simple and gets complicated. Flynn's company is to parachute into Burma and destroy a radar station to open the way for the invasion of Burma by allied forces. They accomplish this fairly easily, (probably too easily), but plans to air-lift them back out at an abandoned airfield, (why would it be abandoned and unguarded in wartime?), have to be aborted because of the arrival of a Japanese force so the men are going to have to make their way out on foot. There are two plans for getting out and it's unclear which would be more likely to be successful so Flynn splits his forces and uses both plans. One group meets with disaster. The other survives but is running out of food, water, ammo and sanity with the Japanese closing in. Just as things look bleak the invasion begins and they get rescued.

Flynn character, so complicated in the previous year's 'Uncertain Glory', is very uncomplicated here. He's a purely good guy and a low-key leader that gets his men to follow him with humane concern for them, (while they are inhumanely mowing down the Japanese), as well as a confident attitude that waivers but never vanishes and some good humor. It's not the sort of performance that wins awards but it carries the mission and movie to a successful conclusion.

A strong musical score by Franz Waxman emphasizes the drama but also the heroism of the cast, even as they underplay that aspect of their roles. The film is somewhat marred by an excessive amount of talk by the men, (who would have remained as silent as possible to avoid detection. There's a lot of talk about where they come from, where they'd rather be and what they'd like to be doing. Would that help morale or degrade it? Particularly irritating is George Tobias, normally one of my favorite character actors, who does the "I'm from New York" schtick to the limit, with a constant line of unfunny patter.

This was one of those Flynn films that was shown by my local station when I was a kid and I've seen it several times since. I recall it as opening the way the trailer does, with Henry Hull's war correspondent reading an account of the mission that could only have been submitted after its completion. He then bridges scenes with his narration - and then dies before the mission is complete. That really shocked me as a kid- the narrator is dead! But the DVD version I now have has no narration by Hull's character. It does have the added-on prolong with Mountbatten and Wingate so Hull's narration must have been sacrificed to the new UK-friendly 1952 version.

It could be argued that this was Errol Flynn's last great film, although it certainly wasn't his last good one. It's also Flynn last film made during World War II and his last taking place during that war, other than the highly obscure and forgotten 1951 film 'Hello God'. After this it was back to westerns and swashbucklers, along with some further attempts at 'serious acting'.

Two ironies of Flynn being in this film- it takes place in the area of the world Flynn grew up in, although he was one the other side of Indochina, (and it was shot in California at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden). He had volunteered to be a guide to forces fighting in New Guinea and other islands in that area. Instead, he was leading a fictional campaign in Burma. During the filming, he wrote his second book, "Showdown" about his adventures in New Guinea in the early 30's. The other irony is that Errol's son, Sean, disappeared in Cambodia while covering the Vietnam War as a photojournalist and has never been found. He, like his father in this film, was stuck behind enemy lines. But life, unlike the movies, doesn't always have happy endings.

The British banned this film for 7 years because they resented the fact that this movie made it look like Flynn won Burma single-handed. Really, when you watch this film, that is not really how it looks. The story is a little different than that but the British felt they didn't get their just credit in this movie & as it was made in 1945, it hit a raw nerve with them.

The story is about a group of paratroops dropped behind enemy lines with the mission of destroying a key enemy radar station. They accomplish that task but then get cut-off from getting out. It really is a game of survivor as in the final Tally all but 11 of them die before the last ones are rescued.

Raol Walsh, excellent for directing action, does a good job on this picture. A rare film in that Flynn has no women to romance in this film- the entire cast is male. While they talk about women, there are none to be found. There are plenty of outdoor sequences & a fair amount of action.

The film opens & closes with some war propaganda, but the text is actually pretty timeless & patriotic.

Objective, Burma! tells the story of an American Airborne platoon that is parachuted behind Japanese lines. Their objective is to destroy a critical radar site that could provide the Japanese early warning of a major allied offensive. The mission starts off well, but then decays in to a terrible ordeal.

My reaction to this film was mixed. I thought Errol Flynn was quite good. He takes a very understated stance this this film and it works quite well. There are some good scenes that are pretty edgy for the time. This film was made in 1945 while the war with Japan was still raging. Half the platoon is believed slaughtered in an ambush, only to later find that there were survivors who were tortured and mutilated by the Japanese. Popular characters, such as the newsman, are broken by the strain and die alone. The night battle on the hilltop at the end is good because it draws out the Japanese approach and shows both sides playing cat-and-mouse to get the other side tip its hand. Also, the film mentions both the Chinese and British as major players in the coming offensive. So it recognizes that we weren't over there alone.

On the flip side, the sort of corny jocularity that is present in a lot of old WWII flicks takes up a lot of space here. The platoon members really comes across as amateurish. The tension of moving behind enemy lines and the danger present in the supply drops were handled much better in "Merrill's Maruaders," a film that a lot of people see as basically grade B. The platoon also seems to slaughter vast hordes of Japanese, who are mostly portrayed as clueless and clumsy. The idea of splitting up the platoon behind enemy lines was pretty ludicrous. The captain would have been court-marshalled for that one! I think that Errol Flynn set the right tone for this movie and he was matched by some of the other actors. But the film didn't maintain this tone and I think it suffers as a result.

The war was winding down, although the majority of the world was unaware of it, when Warner Brothers gave film hoers one of the biggest, one of the quietist, and one of the longest action adventures of that period. This is a drama that other than dramatic music and exotic bird sounds features only infrequent lines of dialog once Errol Flynn and his band of merry men five out of a plane into the unknown jungles and grassy knolls of Burma, the cover for Japanese soldiers preparing their own attacks. It's amazing how they put together a script with events surrounding a shell of a story and make it entertaining.

Flynn is surrounded by a cast of mostly unknown contract character players whose faces you may recognize if you've seen a bulk of Warner's output. The most recognizable is George Tobias who seemed to be in every Warner film of the time, but I found myself also recognizing Henry Hull who just happened to pop up in at least three films I've watched in the past few days.

I'd like to think that what I'm seeing is at least partially based upon truth, but after getting settled in after accepting the fact that I'd be tied down with this for 2 1/2 hours, I was pretty engrossed. It's up there with "Action in the North Atlantic", " Air Force", "Destination Tokyo" and "Edge of Darkness" as films which really put Warners on the map for their output of these brilliantly produced propaganda war films that kept the homefront in tuned with what was going on with their husbands and sons overseas.

For an Englishman, to watch this film for the first time in 2012, some 67 years after its initial release, is to ask what was all the fuss about. The fuss to which I refer is what I have read about in movie magazines and books about movies. Apparently the British people took exception to the way this film allegedly gave the impression that the Americans were solely responsible for victory in Burmaa and implied strongly that the British were not even there. Whilst it is true that the film concentrates on a small group of Americans, parachuted into Burma with a mission to destroy a Japanese radar installation and then, having done so, are obliged to walk some 200 miles to safety because it is unsafe for planes to land, I found nothing strange about focusing on one small unit in this way, I am sure a similar film could have been made about a strictly British unit involved in a similar mission and no one would have complained that there were no Americans portrayed. In fact at the close of the film the producers state that it is dedicated to all servicemen - English, Chinese, etc - who served in Burma. Errol Flynn is fine in the lead role and notably performs hardly any heroics, these are left to the men in his command, but Flynn's charm leaps off the screen. Henry Hull - who within two years would be appearing in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra - is also splendid as a veteran war correspondent who elects to go on the mission. In short a fine example of the genre.