'The Men' has impeccable liberal credentials. Produced, written and directed by the men who would go on to created 'High Noon', that Western riposte to McCarthy, it takes an uncomfortable issue rarely spoken about in the public sphere, and certainly not in Hollywood: paraplegic veterans of the Second World War. Although its focus is on these men, their struggles with their condition, and their attempts to accomodate some sort of normality, the film manages to make some wider points, puncturing the military triumphalism still prevalent in the US: exposing the hypocrisies and intolerance of society, and especially the family; questioning the assumptions of a science that would take the place of religion (we are first introduced to the doctor giving a lecture on paraplegia in the hospital chapel).
'The Men' would have us believe that it is a realistic work because it deals, in a straightforward, downbeat fashion, with a difficult theme simply denied by the artifice of mainstream Hollywood. We are told, firmly and early on, that there will be no miracle cure for these men; we will therefore be denied any sugary uplift at the end, any reconciliation being provisional and fraught. The cast is low-key, and character-actor-driven (this was Marlon Brando's first movie role, and he is frequently subordinated in screen time to the group dynamic of the veterans in the hospital). There will be as much tough talking, strong language and violence as the censors will allow.
So, 'The Men' has its heart in the right place. The road to cinematic hell is paved with good intentions. 'The Men' is a prime example of the cinema of Stanley Kramer, where narrative and entertainment is sacrificed in favour of didactic preaching. The film begins with a nightmare war sequence, borrowed/influenced/pilfered by/from King Vidor's harrowing 'The Big Parade', as a platoon of soldiers slowly populate an eerily empty desertscape. There is no natural sound, just ominous martial music and stylised movements. After this moderate inventiveness, and the shooting that prompts the narrative proper, we go into voiceover, as Ken Wilozek (Brando) gives vent to his self-pityingly bleak feelings about his paraplegia. If this suggests a demoting of the visual in favour of the verbal, at least we're getting the experience from the victim's own viewpoint.
But no. The filmmakers don't trust us enough to empathise and understand, and so we're given a cinematically inert lecture and question-and-answer session from Dr. Brock explaining the tenets and consequences of paraplegia. The audience is not being asked to share a traumatic experience, but is being given a stern lecture about a pertinent issue of the day. You could argue that this scene functions like the end of 'Psycho', where the inane psychobabble is satirised, but there is no such distance here - the doctor is clearly a good man behind his gruff exterior, trying to do his best for these men, without giving them any false hopes. As the film continues, so does the lesson, with facts, examples, statistics, experiments dutifully expounded.
One of the men says he feels like a freak. And this is the way the film presents the men. Their plight is presented from the outside to the outside, an explanation of something unusual to a 'normal' audience. The few attempts at expressionism only serve to make men seem ridiculous, such as the intrusive Rachmaninoff pastiche during Ken and Ellen's reunion, or the preposterous Wagnerian blast that greets Ken's first effort to move.
Brando does his best, but his eruptions of violence here should be compared to his seminal performance in the next year's 'Streetcar named desire'. In that film, violence was an inevitable product of a fully worked out character; here it is forced by violent music and horror-film style into something grotesque, Boris Karloff-like, the horror genre's obsession with the body taken out of context, turning realism into kitsch ('The Men' is, in any case, impossible to take seriously if you've seen Brando's wonderful parody of his performance here in 'Bedtime Story').
Zinnemann's camera rarely moves - movement arises from montage, from editing different camera angles between two over-composed shots. This has none of the dynamics of Eisenstein, resulting in a static aesthetic perfect for the film's intellectual reach.
'The Men' would have us believe that it is a realistic work because it deals, in a straightforward, downbeat fashion, with a difficult theme simply denied by the artifice of mainstream Hollywood. We are told, firmly and early on, that there will be no miracle cure for these men; we will therefore be denied any sugary uplift at the end, any reconciliation being provisional and fraught. The cast is low-key, and character-actor-driven (this was Marlon Brando's first movie role, and he is frequently subordinated in screen time to the group dynamic of the veterans in the hospital). There will be as much tough talking, strong language and violence as the censors will allow.
So, 'The Men' has its heart in the right place. The road to cinematic hell is paved with good intentions. 'The Men' is a prime example of the cinema of Stanley Kramer, where narrative and entertainment is sacrificed in favour of didactic preaching. The film begins with a nightmare war sequence, borrowed/influenced/pilfered by/from King Vidor's harrowing 'The Big Parade', as a platoon of soldiers slowly populate an eerily empty desertscape. There is no natural sound, just ominous martial music and stylised movements. After this moderate inventiveness, and the shooting that prompts the narrative proper, we go into voiceover, as Ken Wilozek (Brando) gives vent to his self-pityingly bleak feelings about his paraplegia. If this suggests a demoting of the visual in favour of the verbal, at least we're getting the experience from the victim's own viewpoint.
But no. The filmmakers don't trust us enough to empathise and understand, and so we're given a cinematically inert lecture and question-and-answer session from Dr. Brock explaining the tenets and consequences of paraplegia. The audience is not being asked to share a traumatic experience, but is being given a stern lecture about a pertinent issue of the day. You could argue that this scene functions like the end of 'Psycho', where the inane psychobabble is satirised, but there is no such distance here - the doctor is clearly a good man behind his gruff exterior, trying to do his best for these men, without giving them any false hopes. As the film continues, so does the lesson, with facts, examples, statistics, experiments dutifully expounded.
One of the men says he feels like a freak. And this is the way the film presents the men. Their plight is presented from the outside to the outside, an explanation of something unusual to a 'normal' audience. The few attempts at expressionism only serve to make men seem ridiculous, such as the intrusive Rachmaninoff pastiche during Ken and Ellen's reunion, or the preposterous Wagnerian blast that greets Ken's first effort to move.
Brando does his best, but his eruptions of violence here should be compared to his seminal performance in the next year's 'Streetcar named desire'. In that film, violence was an inevitable product of a fully worked out character; here it is forced by violent music and horror-film style into something grotesque, Boris Karloff-like, the horror genre's obsession with the body taken out of context, turning realism into kitsch ('The Men' is, in any case, impossible to take seriously if you've seen Brando's wonderful parody of his performance here in 'Bedtime Story').
Zinnemann's camera rarely moves - movement arises from montage, from editing different camera angles between two over-composed shots. This has none of the dynamics of Eisenstein, resulting in a static aesthetic perfect for the film's intellectual reach.