DVD Chronicle: The Red Badge of Courage, and: Apocalypse Now, and: Apocalypse Now Redux, and: Hearts of Darkness—A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, and: Fitzcarraldo, and: Burden of Dreams, and: Unknown Chaplin, and: The Circus, and: Fanny and Alexander, and: The Making of Fanny and Alexander, and: Gods and Monsters, and: Bride of Frankenstein, and: Frankenstein, The Legacy Collection (review)

Midway between two undoubted John Huston masterpieces, The Asphalt Jungle and The African Queen, came the director's adaptation of Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1951). The film was famous in its day for the casting of Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat hero of World War II, in the role of Crane's Youth. In performance, Murphy seems fragile and tentative, more boy than infantryman, and believable enough when he runs away from battle, rendered by Huston in great photogenic clouds of smoke; perhaps somewhat less believable when he recovers himself, heroically charging the Rebel lines. He is in fact a little out-acted by Bill Mauldin, the Stars and Stripes cartoonist, seen here in the first of his two screen roles; and by a handful of Hollywood character actors whom MGM was able to draw on for the grizzled-veteran parts, the Civil War analogues to Willie and Joe, Mauldin's weary dogfaces. The prolonged death of the Tall Soldier, played by one of those character actors, John Dierkes, and played with a minimum of sentiment and a maximum of strangeness, is by itself reason enough to watch The Red Badge of Courage.

The Tall Soldier dies on a hillside covered with wild oats and live oaks—patently not a tidewater Virginia landscape, but a California one, indeed a San Fernando Valley one; most location shooting took place there, on Huston's own ranch. This is a fact revealed in Lillian Ross's book Picture (1952), an almost day-by-day account of how The Red Badge of Courage was made, and still another reason to watch it; going back and forth between the film and Ross's reportage amounts to a tutorial on 1950s movie production. A New Yorker journalist skilled at cold-eyed portrayals of oversize male egos, as in her famous profile of Ernest Hemingway, Ross in Picture turns that eye on Louis B. Mayer, whom she captures in his cream-colored studio office, enthusiastically if not very grammatically ("Between you and I and the lamppost") denigrating The Red Badge of Courage for lacking heart. Dore Schary, then in a power struggle with Mayer for control of MGM, took over the film after Huston departed for Africa, and from Schary came some of its veneration of Crane as a Great Writer—a solemn narrating voiceover, an opening with pages of the famous classic being turned before our eyes. Touches of "heart," I suppose, or perhaps of "class," but they matter less than the film's fidelity to the American vernacular heard in cornpone accents ("I hope there won't be no more fightin' till a week from Monday!") and its slyly ironic portrayal of military posturing; a Union general goes down the line rallying the boys by issuing exactly the same faux-hearty encouragement to each ragged group he meets.

Nowadays a film's how-we-made-it story is likely to be told cinematically, in featurettes on DVDs or stand...