Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16300 in VHS
• Released on: 1998-09-01
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, NTSC
• Original language: English, Latin, Spanish
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Amazon.com
Tay Garnett was a hard-nosed, job-of-all-work director who moved from studio to studio and genre to genre throughout the golden age of Hollywood. He never achieved the status, let alone the distinctive signature, of a Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh; still, with talent, brashness, and cojones to spare, he was responsible for a slew of cheerfully vulgar entertainments, and several genuinely fine films.

Bataan may well be the best. Certainly it's one of the strongest Hollywood salutes to the war effort while World War II was still raging. In his grittiest role to date, Robert Taylor (sans mustache) plays a U.S. Army sergeant fighting a rear-guard action in the Philippine jungle, covering Douglas MacArthur's retreat. His platoon is the usual wartime study in democratic motley: veterans (Lloyd Nolan, Thomas Mitchell, Tom Dugan) thrown together with green recruits (Robert Walker, Barry Nelson), a Latino (Desi Arnaz), a black (Kenneth Spencer), not to mention a couple of stalwart Filipinos (Roque Espiritu, J. Alex Havier), and several officer types (George Murphy, Lee Bowman) with sense enough to defer to the sergeant's judgment. As in John Ford's desert classic The Lost Patrol, the group is whittled down through misadventure, disease, and skirmishes with the ever-advancing Japanese, till only a handful remain for a still-shattering last stand.

Bataan was made at MGM, and the principal setting, a jungle clearing overlooking a strategic bridge, stinks of the soundstage. In other respects, however, Garnett manages to introduce shocking, un-Metro-like realism into the proceedings. In an early scene of bombardment, a GI, blinded, crawls out of the wreckage of a field hospital only to have a smoking roofbeam crush his bandaged skull. There's nothing cosmetic about the wounds in this movie; they hurt and they bleed, and people get them during the most gruesome hand-to-hand combat in any '40s war movie. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Gritty, Violent, and Remarkable
As wartime propaganda, "Bataan" is brilliant--watching it, you may be filled with a seething hostility toward the Japanese that hasn't been felt since Reagan's 1980s. But what's more remarkable is that this gritty, often racist Robert Taylor vehicle is pretty solid as a movie, too. Filmed on an atmospheric soundstage that doubles for the jungle, its moody production practically oozes menace and rivals the Universal "monster movies" of the 1930s. (Watch it at night with the lights off for the full effect.) Often dubbed a remake of John Ford's "The Lost Patrol," "Bataan" has as much in common with any number of last-stand movies . . . as well as later slashfests like "Friday, the 13th," where each character's inevitable demise is more gruesome than the last. In that respect, "Bataan" is again remarkable, as the violence is graphic and shocking, particularly for the period in which the film was made. The cast of many familiar faces, including Desi Arnez, Barry Nelson, Lloyd Nolan, and Robert Walker, also deliver the emotional goods, keeping us caring about what happens next to these doomed men, a quality more recent films generally lack. If you're expecting the technoglitz excess of "Black Hawk Down," you'll probably be disappointed by "Bataan." But if you want to see a Hollywood depiction of war as a silvery nightmare, this may well be the one movie to watch.

"We will return to Bataan." - Douglas MacArthur
Hollywood's early homage to the American fighting man in the Pacific, `the shadowy heroes history will never forget', BATAAN (1943) celebrates tenacious resolve and defiance in defeat. Robert Taylor stars as Sgt. Bill Dane, the leader of a small squad - about thirteen men - ordered to destroy a bridge and hold a crossing against an irresistible wave of Japanese soldiers. The fate of the squadron is announced early on in the movie; among the opening credits is a title card telling us that the movie is "Reverently dedicated to the fallen dead." The movie opens with Allied force retreating to Corregidor as a result of an overwhelming landing of Japanese forces in January, 1942. Sgt. Dane and his small squad are ordered to destroy a bridge and delay any force trying to cross over and/or repair the bridge.
The squad is diverse - there's a flyboy lieutenant (George Murphy), a callow young sailor (Robert Walker in his first credited screen appearance), a Filipino (Roque Espiritu), a Latino (Desi Arnaz) and an African-American (Kenneth Spencer). It might be faulty history, but it's a convenient teaming when the message is we're all in this together. The fight sequences were about as realistic as any shown up to that time - men are decapitated (up to the point of sword striking neck, that is), enemy soldiers are strangled, soldiers continue to bludgeon the fallen dead. Tame by today's standards, I imagine the fight sequences affected its audience much the same way the opening scene in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN shook more modern audiences. The lulls between the battle are a bit more familiar - the Spencer character hums "St. James Infirmary" and is learning to be a preacher back home. The Arnaz character bops to Tommy Dorsey on the battery powered radio. There's a sub-plot involving some past troubles between Sgt. Dane and Cpl Barney Todd (Lloyd Nolan) that's deftly handled.
Although dated in many ways, I found BATAAN fascinating and entertaining and somewhat of an entry into the mindset of the generation of Americans responding to the first shock of war. Strong recommendation.

Excellent
Done when it was far from sure we were going to win WW II. This is an extraordinary dramatic portrayal of the "last stand" US and Filipino forces made on Bataan. Of course it is not a docudrama straining for accurarcy, that could come after we won. This was a depiction of a varied group of Americans and Filipinos coming together in a hopeless situation to do as much as they could (remind anyone of Flight 93?). Of course there actually were rear guard actions and delaying actions as the Japanese advanced on Bataan so in a way you could say it does stand for unknown heroic acts by the defenders. Interestingly when units are mentioned in the film they are the real units that fought in the Philippines in '41-'42. I would also recommend "Eve of Saint Mark" which addresses the same issues and has a great performance by Vincent Price but I have never seen a copy offered for sale and am afraid it is a lost gem.