In John Ford's They Were Expendable, John Wayne's Lieutenant Rusty Ryan insists that the P-T boats, equipped with guns and torpedo tubes, could slip into the Japanese harbors. Ryan's temperament stands in sharp opposition to Lieutenant John Brickley (Robet Montgomery), a calm and rational commander. Ryan gets increasingly frustrated--the disbelief in the boats' potential and the lack of action bore him to death.
Challenged by Brickley, "What are you aiming at, building a reputation, or playing for the team" Ryan says, "For years, I've been taking your fatherly advice and it's never been very good. From now on, I'm a one-man band." Ryan becomes all more frustrated upon learning that the boats are assigned to messenger duty. He claims again, "I'm bored to death running messages."
Later, when the boats are assigned to destroy a Japanese cruiser, Ryan is eager to go out but instead he is rushed to the hospital for treatment of an infected arm. He arrives at the hospital kicking and screaming. When the nurse suggests, to calm him down, that they go dancing, Ryan yells, "Listen, sister, I don't dance, and I can't take the time out now to learn. All I want is to get out of here."
After his boat had been sunk, Ryan is ordered to fly back to Washington to organize new P-T Boat squadrons, but he loathes leaving. He tries to get off the plane offering his place to another officer. When the officer asks him to call his wife, Ryan explodes, "Phone her. I got business here and you got business back in the States." All Ryan wants is to be at the battle zone. But once again, it is Brickley needs to brings him into line, "Ryan, who're you working for Yourself"
The most unfortunate thing about Ford's excellent war picture was the date of its release: December l945. By that time, American audiences were saturated with the war movie genre. As the critic Andrew Sarris observed, once the War was over, the public did not want to see a film dealing with "the very early misadventures of the war four years ago. "What could have seemed more perverse," Sarris comments in reference to the evacuation of General MacArthur, "than Ford's celebration of gallant defeat in the aftermath of glorious victory."
It was somehow anachronistic to see in late l945 a war picture that stresses the values of self-service and devotion to duty. They Were Expendable and other war films that followed demonstrated that "once the war was over, the war film tended to slide in social significance from a cause to a genre, from a statement of principle to a set of platitudes."
Since Wayne's war films were not made in a social or political void, they suffer from all the genre's weaknesses. Complicated issues were naively simplified in poor screenplays that lacked realism or credibility. And while the heroics of American fighters were glorified and exaggerated, the portrayal of the enemy, German as well as Japanese, was stereotypical and one-dimensional.
There was little concern with cinematic aesthetic as such. Most war pictures were social documents, emphasizing the contents of their messages at the expense of visual aspects. This is the reason why They Were Expendable still stands out. It's beautifully directed and photographed, by Joseph H. August.
The critic James Agee first criticized the film, then in a second review, changed his mind and singled out its artistic qualities. "Visually, and in detail, and in nearly everything he does with people," Agee wrote, "I think it is John Ford's finest movie." However, Agee also conceded that the film is showing "nothing much newer, with no particular depth of feeling, much less idea."
