The Red Badge of Courage

By the time MGM had finished chopping and re-editing Huston's footage in quest of a more conventional war movie, the interior logic of Stephen Crane's account of a terrified boy's baptism of fire during the American Civil War had been rudely cast overboard. The fragments that remain, linked by a voice-over commentary drawn from the novel, nevertheless exhibit a remarkable delicacy and depth of feeling that sometimes (as in the death of the Tall Soldier) approximates the visionary quality of the novel. And visually, with Harold Rosson's camerawork lovingly recreating the harsh, dustily faded textures of Matthew Brady's Civil War pictures, it looks absolutely superb.