Beachhead (1954, Stuart Heisler) (Patreon)

45/100

Interesting solely as an example of image management. Tony Curtis had made the transition to leading man but wasn't yet a major star (Trapeze finally accomplished that, from what I can gather), and the disjunction between Beachhead's ostensible war-is-hell worldview (the source novel, written by a WWII vet, is titled I've Got Mine) and United Artists' shameless agenda ("That Curtis guy makes the jungle steam...in his hottest adventure!") is kind of hilarious. The film doesn't flinch from horror: one Marine gets pulled headfirst into a Japanese tank after dropping a grenade inside; Curtis and his C.O., Frank Lovejoy, mutilate the faces of dead enemies (in an effort to pass them as their own corpses, so that living enemies won't continue to hunt them down); a petrified Japanese deserter who surrenders winds up traded to a local who clearly intends to kill him, in exchange for the use of a canoe. But those are isolated moments in what's otherwise a pretty tepid reconnaissance mission (there's precious little beachhead to be seen, for the record), and the mid-film introduction of Curtis' romantic interest—she's the adult daughter of a Frenchman whose intelligence our heroes need to confirm—utterly fails to replicate From Here to Eternity's amalgam of torrid and tragic. At this point, Curtis was still mostly a pretty face, and he doesn't really know what to do here apart from bark his lines and scowl a lot. As for director Stuart Heisler, I don't really have a bead on him—been a long time since I saw The Glass Key—but he doesn't exactly take full advantage of the shoot's Hawaiian locations. In a word: forgettable. I've been culling mediocrities from my Classicflix queue, acknowledging that I won't live long enough to watch every golden-age Hollywood movie that's ever been released on Blu-ray (much less DVD), but some inexplicable three-star Maltin Guide entries are still around to disappoint, it seems.