In looking at the movies that are on my DVR, I notice that I've got quite a few from April when Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month. So even though I've got some older stuff on my DVR, especially foreign films, I decided to fire up one of the Brando films. This time, it was his first feature film, The Men.
The movie begins with one of those prologues that in the earlier days, especially with historical films, would scroll up over the screen. This time, the prologue informs us that the movie is about the struggles men face after returning home from war, and how these can be greater than the actual struggle of combat. We then are presented with an establishing scene of urban combat in which a man is shot by a sniper, leaving him paralyzed. That man, Lt. Ken Wilocek (Marlon Brando), is then overlooked for several minutes while we get to scenes to introduce some of the other characters.
Probably most important here is Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane). He's been doing research into paraplegia, and is working at a veterans' hospital since World War II gave doctors a lot of injured soldiers to treat. Again, however, before we meet the soldiers, we meet the women in the soldiers' lives, wives, mothers, and girlfriends, as Dr. Brock gives them a lecture on what to expect and answers their questions, including some fairly frank questions for a film from 1950 about the regularity of the urinary and intestinal tracts, as well as the ability to father children.
As for the soldiers, they're housed in wards since there seems to be so many of them. The important ones for our movie are Norm (Jack Webb, sporting a ridiculous goatee that Sgt. Friday would have railed against for being the sign of a beatnik druggie), who is a bit of the boss of the ward and head of the hospital's branch of the Paralyzed Veterans of America; Leo (Richard Doolin), who since the war seems to care more about playing the ponies; and Angel (Arthur Jurado, a paraplegic in real life), a Mexican-American who wants to be able to build a better house for his widowed mother and younger siblings. Lt. Wilocek is still in a private room, which is where the more serious cases go, although it really feels as though what's serious about his case is that he, like Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives has greater psychological problems than physical.
It's easy to think of Dana Andrews here, not just because both characters needed to get wise to themselves. In addition, Ken's old girlfriend from college before the war, Ellen, is played by Teresa Wright. She's still in love with Ken, and she thinks she can make things "better" in some amorphous way. But Ken is trying to block her at every turn. To add to the Best Years of Our Lives comparison, there's a scene later in the movie with actor Ray Teal, who picked on Harold Russell about what good came of his injuries. Here, he picks on the paralyzed veterans at a bar and gets punched for his trouble.
I mentioned several months back when I reviewed Not As a Stranger that, watching a Stanley Kramer movie, it sometimes feels as though the point that he's trying to make is sometimes more important than the story itself. There's a fair bit of that in The Men, starting with the lecture scene. There's also a bit of a feeling that in discussing the relationship problems Ken and Ellen would go through, Kramer and scriptwriter Carl Foreman might have had a laundry list of issues they wanted to discuss.
On the whole, however, The Men does work, thanks in part to a strong performance from Brando, which is unsurprising given what his career would go on to be. Much more surprising, however, is the performance from Jack Webb, who most definitely is not the wooden stereotype he'd go on to be especially in the 1960s Dragnet days.
So even though The Men is not without its flaws, it's one you should probably watch if you get the chance.
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