by Brendan Foley
No lions were harmed in the making of this picture. Or used, at all. The title is a sham. Biggest ripoff since I paid to see Four Lions and found out it was actually a brilliant satire of modern terror without a single goddamn lion in it. I marched right down the convenience store and started punching the shit out of the Red Box. My right hand is a useless lump of calcified bone and flesh and I am no longer allowed at 7–11s, nationwide, but I think the point remains.
…What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, The Young Lions is a 1958 WWII film starring Marlon Brando, Dean Martin, and Montgomery Clift, directed by Edward Dmytryk. It’s a good old epic, new on Blu thanks to Twilight Time, and is very much worth a watch.
To know whether or not this is a good film for you, let me throw a prospect your way: a war film that skips the war. While The Young Lions does sporadically feature combat scenes, the focus is almost entirely on the in-between times, on the down moments between soldiers as they reflect on where they are, what they’ve done, and what sort of future lies ahead of them. With an epic scope that spans years and continents, The Young Lions still feels strangely intimate as it hones down on three ordinary men caught up in a struggle that would redefine the world.
Leading off is Marlon Brando as Christian, an Alps ski-instructor who believes that Hitler will bring prosperity back to Germany and considers the, ahem, uglier sides of Nazism to be only a few fringe crazies that have no actual bearing on Germany. Ha ha ha. Christian joins the Army as a lieutenant and spends WWII hopping from warfront to warfront, at each step of the way growing more and more disillusioned with his choices.
Representing the home team are Montgomery Clift as Noah Ackerman, a Jewish-American soldier who finds himself suffering from discrimination and bigotry from his own countrymen, and Dean Martin as Michael Whitacre, a popular Broadway performer who is desperate to keep his own hide off the front lines.
The movie charts the parallel careers of Christian as he descends through the reality of Nazi Germany with Noah and Michael as they get drafted, combat prejudice among their fellow soldiers, and begin making their way across Europe. As a person with basic understanding of how stories work, you can probably guess that this group is working towards a collision, and the long runtime gives you plenty of time to speculate on what you hope, or fear, will occur when the German and the Americans finally cross paths.
If you want to think of this movie as a competition (and, as an American, this is what I am wired to do) then Brando is the clear winner. The later years of bloat and, let’s face it, pants-shitting insanity cloud it now, but in 1958 Brando was rocking matinee idol good looks and could command the screen with just a gesture. Brando sells you on the frankly ludicrous idea of ‘The Good German’, and he expertly captures the various stages of Christian’s disillusionment as he goes from believing he simply needs to find the right outpost from which to serve his country to finally coming to grips with what he has been a part to. As the war consumes both his sanity and the lives of his friends and comrades, Christian crawls deeper inside of himself until he’s practically comatose from the wear of it all.
(One thing that was bugging the fuck out of me the whole movie [and it’s a long movie so the bugging of this particular fuck was agonizing] was the way the Holocaust failed to come up whenever Christian was having an argument with various other characters about the relative good of Nazism or the German war-plan. It seemed like kind of a dealbreaker for that whole mentality, you know? It got to the point where I was wondering if the film was going to skip that entirely, and if you are making a WWII movie that’s at least in part from the German perspective, you do not get to skip that. Fortunately (relatively speaking) the film finally finds its way through the gates of a concentration camp and is appropriately both horrified and horrifying. It’s the best material in the film, in part because of how completely Brando registers the complete collapse of Christian’s mind as a result of what he now knows.)
The Clift/Martin stuff is a little spottier, if only because it feels like the film pulls its punches with the American side. For a while, it seemed like the movie was contrasting the genteel German officers with the rowdy, cruel American enlisted men and the abuse they rain down on Ackerman, challenging our preconceived notions of the indisputable moral superiority of every individual soldier on each side. Fine enough idea, but then they go and have An Important Person deliver a speech about how the hateful pieces of shit are the minority and True Americans are of course just, just so totally righteous, you guys.
(There’s a long section of The Young Lions devoted to Clift having a series of boxing matches with some of his abusers, and it’s good stuff but marred by the fact that Montgomery Clift appears to weigh 90 pounds, wet, and has a fighting style that can only be described as Burt Ward shadowboxing while having a stroke. Let’s just say, it’s not believable when he lands a knockout punch.)
The same goes for Martin’s ‘cowardice’. There’s interesting ore to mined from the idea of a guy looking at war and wanting nothing to do with it, but the film has to come around to the idea that survival instinct is for wimps and Martin has to go out to the frontlines if he ever wants to be a real man again.
I bet John Wayne cried like a child when he saw this.
Whenever the movie cuts away from Brando, it’s to the loss of the overall picture. But it picks up power as it goes along, with the very real chance that some or most of our main guys not making it to the other side becoming more and more palpable as the Allies advance and the strings binding Christian to the Americans growing tighter and tighter. The ending is blunt and ugly, a final moralistic salvo to remind us that war doesn’t give a fuck about your intentions.
Fans of Brando, Clift, and Dean should give this movie a whirl (the whole movie is worth it for Brando alone) and film buffs will also get a chance to see a mustache-less Lee Van Cleef in an early role (as a mustache-twirlingly-evil character though). The Young Lions probably won’t knock any of your favorite WWII films off the shelf, but it’s an intelligent and empathetic look at one of the darkest moments of the modern world, with some incredibly talented folks operating at the top of their game.