Home of the Brave is a 1949 film based on a play by Arthur Laurents. It was directed by Mark Robson and stars Douglas Dick, Jeff Corey, Lloyd Bridges, Frank Lovejoy, James Edwards, and Steve Brodie.
The National Board of Review named the film the eighth best of 1949.
Home of the Brave utilizes the recurrent theme of a diverse group of men being subjected to the horror of war and their individual reactions, in this case, the hell of jungle combat against the Japanese in World War II.
Plot
Undergoing psychoanalysis by an Army psychiatrist, (Jeff Corey), a paralyzed African-American war veteran Private Peter Moss (Edwards) begins to walk again only when he confronts his fear of forever being an "outsider."
The film uses flashback techniques to show Moss, an Engineer topography specialist assigned to a reconnaissance patrol who are clandestinely landed from a PT boat on a Japanese held island in the South Pacific to prepare the island for a major amphibious landing. The patrol is led by a young Lieutenant Douglas Dick and includes Moss's lifelong white friend Finch (Bridges), whose death leaves him racked with guilt; redneck-bigot corporal T.J. (Brodie); and sturdy but troubled Sergeant Mingo (Lovejoy).
When the patrol is discovered Finch is left behind and captured by the Japanese who force him to cry out to the patrol. The dying Finch escapes and dies in Moss's arms. In a firefight with the Japanese Mingo is wounded in the arm and Moss is unable to walk. T.J. carries Moss to the returning PT boat that covers the men with its twin .50 calibre machineguns.
In the film's crucial scene, the doctor (Corey) forces Moss to overcome his paralysis by yelling a racial slur; from this point on, Moss will never again kowtow to prejudice. Mingo and Moss decide to go into business together.
Legacy
In the original play the main character was Jewish, but for the film he was changed to African-American. In a topical decision, President Truman's Executive Order 9981 had ordered the U.S. Armed Forces to be fully integrated in 1948.
Home of the Brave managed to combine three of the top film genres of 1949: the war film, the psychological drama, and the problems of African-Americans. It was the first Hollywood movie to be allowed to use the word "nigger" after The Emperor Jones (with the 1934 establishment of the Hays Code, the word had been forbidden by censors).
Director Robson, who had begun his directing career with several Val Lewton RKO horror films brings a frighting feeling to the claustrophobic jungle set with Dimitri Tiomkin providing an eerie choral rendition of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child as the patrol escapes their Japanese pursuers.
Mingo recites Eve Merriam's 1943 poem The Coward to Edwards.
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