Merrill's Marauders

Buy This Item Merrill's Marauders  Available from Amazon  $11.42  on 11-29-2008     The theatrical trailer included in this DVD release of <I>Merrill’s Marauders</I>, touting its depiction of "World War II’s most fabulous jungle fighters… (as) they showed the world what the American soldier can do," makes director Samuel Fuller’s 1962 film sound like jingoistic propaganda, but it’s considerably more than that. The year is 1944; the U.S. Army’s 5307th Composite Unit, a 3000-strong outfit under the command of Brigadier General Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler), has already been fighting the occupying Japanese forces in the wilds of Burma for several months when they’re assigned to march hundreds of miles through jungles, swamps, and mountains to Myitkyina, a town of considerable strategic importance and the gateway to India, where the Allies fear the Japanese and Nazis will meet and consolidate their forces. Mission impossible? So it would seem, as the men are exhausted, disease-ridden, disheartened, and ill-equipped; his second in command, Lt. Stockton (Ty Hardin), argues that they'll never make it, but Merrill (who has a heart condition that could bring him down at any moment) refuses to let up. There are numerous combat sequences, most of them quite convincing (including a very cool scene in a concrete maze), but the film’s strength lies not only in its graphic chronicling of the obvious horrors of war but in its sympathetic (but never condescending) portrayal of the more quotidian aspects of these soldiers' miserable lives, from easy banter to quarrels over food and ammunition, from the interactions with locals to the sheer hell of simply walking another step when you’ve already passed the limits of human endurance. Grim, gritty, intense, and realistic (Fuller was an Army vet himself), this is an effective precursor to the director’s best-known movie, <I>The Big Red One</I>. <I>--Sam Graham</I> Reader Reviews this was a partnership between warner brothers and a filipino film company. It starred Jeff Chandler as Brig. General Frank Merrill who's whose company were top jungle fighters during WW2 in the CBI theater of operations. Other solid names in this production were some of the Warners stock company, Ty Hardin, Claude Akins, Andrew Duggan, Will Hutchins, and Peter Brown. It's a nice war film most notable by being Jeff Chandler's last film before going in for back surgery which was horribly botched leading to Jeff's premature death at the age of forty two.

Merrill's Marauders Available from Amazon Price: $11.42 Updated on 11-29-2008.

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