The Red Badge of Courage (1951 film)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Red Badge of Courage, the 1951 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer war film directed by John Huston, arrived in theaters having already survived a war of its own. Huston believed the two-hour cut he had assembled was the finest work he had ever directed. MGM disagreed. After poor responses at West Coast audience screenings, the studio cut the film down to 70 minutes. The story of how that footage disappeared, and what the film's turbulent production revealed about the relationship between art and commerce in Hollywood, became nearly as famous as the film itself. What kind of battlefield picture requires film noir camera techniques to tell its story? What happens when a soldier famous for real-world heroism plays a soldier famous for running away? And what does it mean to make a sparse, faithful adaptation of a novel that works best in stream-of-consciousness prose? Those are the questions that followed The Red Badge of Courage from the moment Huston first put it on film.

• 2. Audie Murphy and the Role

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  Audie Murphy, who served with the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, was cast as Henry Fleming, a Union private so overcome with fear that he deserts his regiment mid-battle. The casting carried an unmistakable tension. Murphy was among the most decorated American combat veterans of the war, and he was being asked to embody cowardice on screen. His co-star Bill Mauldin, who played Henry's friend Tom Wilson, was himself a World War II veteran; his editorial cartoons had been compiled in the bestselling book Up Front. James Whitmore, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, provided the film's narration without screen credit. The three veterans brought an authenticity to the film's depiction of fear and survival that no amount of casting could have manufactured. The story of Henry Fleming is ultimately one of a lie that enables courage: Henry deceives Tom about the head wound he received in a panic-stricken soldier's rifle blow, and that deception lets him return to battle as if he had never fled. Murphy's real history hovered behind every scene in which his character pretended to be brave.

• 3. Huston's Visual Approach

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  Director John Huston drew on the language of film noir to shape the battlefield sequences, employing unusual compositions and camera angles that made the Civil War environment feel disorienting and alienating rather than heroic. The cinematographer was Harold Rosson, and the music score was composed by Bronislau Kaper. Huston's problem, as critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times identified in a contemporary review, was a fundamental one of medium. Stephen Crane's 1895 novel conveyed its hero's inner life through what Crowther called near stream-of-consciousness descriptions, a technique that works best with words. When the camera follows a soldier through moments of dread or disorientation, it shows a face rather than a mind. Crowther wrote that Huston had captured most of the novel's major encounters vividly, but noted that one scene from the source novel was absent from the film: the shocking discovery of a rotting corpse in the woods. The screenwriter was Huston himself, with Albert Band adapting the novel as well. The final film that reached audiences ran 70 minutes, with material from an original two-hour assembly gone.

• 4. MGM's Cut and the Lost Footage

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  Following the poor West Coast audience screenings, MGM postponed the film's release and trimmed it from roughly two hours down to 70 minutes. Huston and star Audie Murphy both tried to purchase the film from the studio so that the original cut could be restored, but their attempt failed. Huston was also occupied with preproduction on his next project, The African Queen, which may have limited how forcefully he could press the matter. MGM later released the film for distribution primarily to arthouse theaters, using a special booking and advertising policy that was unusual for a major studio at that time. The studio later claimed that the excised footage had been destroyed, most likely in the 1965 MGM vault fire. In 1975, MGM approached Huston directly to ask whether he held a copy of the original cut, because the studio wanted to rerelease the film. Huston told them he did not have it and that it no longer existed. The experience led him to instruct his agent, Paul Kohner, to add a clause to all his future contracts: every film Huston directed must include a provision giving him a 16 mm print of the first cut.

• 5. The Book Behind the Production

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  The production of The Red Badge of Courage became the subject of Lillian Ross's book Picture, published in 1952 and originally serialized in The New Yorker. Ross documented the film's creation with what became a critically acclaimed account of how Hollywood actually worked, using the Huston production as its central case study. The executive producer was Dore Schary, and the film was produced by Gottfried Reinhardt. Ross's book sits alongside the film itself as a record of the tensions between a director's vision and a studio's commercial concerns, and it remains one of the more detailed firsthand chronicles of a Hollywood production from that era. The film also received a comic-book adaptation in Fawcett Motion Picture Comics issue 105, published in July 1951.

• 6. Box Office and Reception

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  Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, called the film a major achievement that should command admiration for years and years, while also acknowledging that it could not deliver the emotional intensity of Stephen Crane's original novel. The distinction he drew was precise: putting a camera next to a soldier's face while he waits for battle cannot replicate what prose does when it gets inside that soldier's mind. According to MGM's own records, the film earned $789,000 in the United States and Canada and $291,000 in other countries, resulting in a total loss of $1,018,000. It ranked among the studio's least successful releases of that year, though MGM noted that three other films that year lost more money: Calling Bulldog Drummond, Mr. Imperium, and Inside Straight. The contemporary critical consensus, as measured on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, shows 86% of 14 critics' reviews as positive. Crowther's praise proved durable even as the box office numbers did not, and Huston's contractual response to the whole experience, requiring a personal 16 mm print of every first cut he ever directed afterward, became a lasting footnote to the film's difficult history.