SOLDIERING ON
HOLLYWOOD is always being accused of having a pernicious influence on our personal values, of preferring to promote sex, violence, moral equivalency and other horrible perversities. Yet two of the fall's best films -- "Flags of Our Fathers" and "The Queen" -- honor an especially timely traditional value: people who choose reticence over shameless exhibitionism.
The heroes of "Flags of Our Fathers" are the five Marines and a Navy corpsman who raised the Stars and Stripes atop Mt. Suribachi after a bloody battle on the island of Iwo Jima in 1945, a flag-raising that would be immortalized with a photo splashed across front pages all over America. The accomplishment provided such a morale boost that the War Department sent three of the men around the country to help sell war bonds. The sales pitch was a success, but it came with a price. The fundraising spectacle transformed the men into cheesy circus performers, forced to replicate the flag-raising over and over, once atop a papier-mache replica of Mt. Suribachi at Chicago's Soldier Field.
The film, directed by Clint Eastwood, offers a barbed critique of wartime propaganda, but its most poignant moments involve the troops themselves. Stoic and taciturn, not unlike so many characters Eastwood has played over the years, they are guilt-ridden by all the acclaim. "The fakery got to them," Eastwood told me the other day in his bungalow on the Warner Bros. lot. "Having been on the real Suribachi, it must've seemed incredibly cornball to go on a papier-mache version of it, especially knowing half the people who really did it were dead."
To men of that era, war was usually accompanied by so much death and destruction that when you came home, you never wanted to talk about it again. John "Doc" Bradley, one of the three flag-raisers portrayed in "Flags," won the Navy Cross during the war. "But he didn't want any part of it -- he forgot where he put the medal," Eastwood explains. "His family didn't even know he had it."
In today's hyped-up media age, when soldiers like Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch were breathlessly sold as heroes, a man like Bradley wouldn't get to put that medal away for long, not with Oprah and Diane Sawyer around. "Today, no matter how reclusive the guy would want to be, it would be an endless topic of conversation," says Eastwood. "They'd beat the hell out of him; they'd never let up. Between the press and the government, they'd convince him to be a celebrity."
