Truly Dreadful Film

Fantastic!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

As an actor Errol Flynn had the dubious distinction of starring in both one of the worst propaganda war films and one of the best war films from a major studio during World War II. The worst was Desperate Journey and one of the best is Objective Burma. It was even recognized by the Academy as such getting Oscar nominations for best original story, film editing and best musical scoring.One category it should have gotten recognition is in the matter of sets. During wartime one could not travel to exotic locations to portray a jungle and a swamp. Warner Brothers did a remarkable job in recreating the Burmese jungle.Errol Flynn kept the bravura heroics which he was known for down to a minimum in this film. Here he is just a professional soldier charged with doing a job which is destroy a radio transmitting station deep in the Burmese jungle. Getting out is another problem as Flynn and his command can't meet their drop and have to march out. That original story was written by Alvah Bessie and the screenplay adapted from it was done by Lester Cole two of the Hollywood 10. No doubt the keepers of our patriotism at the House Un-American Activities Committee poured over the film and script looking for evidence of any suspicious Communist propaganda. I confess I found none.Henry Hull should also be singled out here as well. In many ways he's playing the character he created in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat now transplanted to the China-Burma-India theater of World War II. Like in Lifeboat, Hull is the epitome of the civilized man whose whole world is shaken when he confronts the brutality of war, be it the evil of Nazi Walter Slezak in Lifeboat or the Japanese atrocities done to our troops in their areas of World War II.Maybe Warner Brothers should have splurged for some color although that was kept to a minimum during the war years to bring out the jungle backgrounds better. It worked well with later films like Never So Few and Merrill's Marauders that dealt with the same war theater.Objective Burma was also castigated in British circles because in point of fact the CBI theater was primarily a British show with Lord Louis Mountbatten as the theater commander and Field Marshal Sir William Slim as the ground commander in Burma. We were there, but a distinct minority and strictly in support.Despite their objections from across the pond Objective Burma is one of the best World War II era films that still holds up well for today's audience.

" . . . wipe 'Em off the Face of the Earth!" suggests "Pops," the embedded paratrooper\reporter, in light of just the most recent violation of the Geneva Conventions by the Japanese during WWII. This exact quote from OPERATION, BURMA! fell on deaf ears, tragically giving rise to America's current Ruling Class of Nippon Confederates, popularized 24\7 on their Fox "News" Disinformation Networks. As Millenials smugly tool down America's highways in their Toyotas and Hondas, blaring away their Country tunes, they're being picked off one-by-one from shrapnel blasted out of tens of millions of Trojan Horse Takata Corp. Airbags. In 1945, the U.S. War Department dictated a closing scroll message for OPERATION, BURMA!: "This story will end only when the Evil forces of Japan are totally destroyed." But they and their Confederate allies rule the roost in America today, due to a feckless Namby-Pamby "live and let live" flaw in our National Character. Surely U.S. Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and Errol Flynn are dizzy from constantly turning over in their graves.

See it - The Japanese got more than they bargained for when they decided to mess with Errol Flynn. This time, Flynn plays the role of an American soldier commanding a handful of men who successfully complete a mission but must trek through miles of jungle to get to their rendezvous point. You know what that means – a high bad guy body count. There are three good combat sequences and a couple other smaller skirmishes. Different parts reminded me a lot of "Tears of the Sun" and "We Were Soldiers." This film is a little prejudiced, but I think it's forgivable when you consider we were at war with Japan when it was released. All in all, a classic first-rate WWII movie.

Errol Flynn (who I am most familiar with as a swashbuckling swordsman type) offered a totally convincing performance here as the commander of a group of American commandos sent behind enemy lines into Burma to blow up a Japanese radar station in preparation for an allied invasion of the country during World War II. At about the one hour mark of the movie you begin to wonder what's happening. Everything seems to be far too easy for the Americans. They get into Burma with no trouble; they blow up the radar station quickly and easily (and kill a bunch of Japanese soldiers in the process) and they quickly get away to the rendezvous point where they're to be picked up by an American plane - and they do all this without suffering a single casualty. And yet, it's the very easiness of the mission that begins to build the tension. You know it can't be this easy; you know something has to happen - which it finally does. The plane that's supposed to pick them up can't land because there are too many Japanese around, and the men are forced to try to find their way out of Burma and back to their base on foot - an increasingly hopeless task as they deal with hunger, the jungle, and the Japanese.The climax of the movie probably begins when Nelson (Flynn) orders the squad to split into two and meet up later. The second group gets captured, and when Nelson finally finds them, he discovers that they've been horribly massacred in a Japanese-held village. Nothing of the massacre is shown (which makes it all the more horrific to the viewer, because it's all left to your imagination) but we get a taste when they discover Lt. Jacobs (William Prince) still barely alive. He begs Nelson to kill him just before he dies, making you wonder what's happened to him. That was a very brief but very powerful scene.I would describe this movie as tense rather than exciting in the standard way, and the tension is built very well. I'm not tremendously fond of war movies, but I liked this because the emphasis wasn't so much on never-ending battle, but was rather on the human story of these soldiers and how they dealt with their seemingly hopeless situation, and with the prospect of dying in the jungle and never seeing home again.