When a Proceedings editor called and asked me to write an article on what he called Marine Corps "cult movies," my first thought was, "Is there some epidemic of Marines continually watching Little Shop of Horrors or The Rocky Horror Picture Show that has impacted the combat readiness of the Corps?"
Ask someone to name a favorite cult movie and it is 1,000 times more likely they will answer Attack of the Killer Tomatoes than Zulu. Yet my charge was to delve into those movies, like Zulu, that Marines might watch over and over for their motivational, instructive, and entertainment value, but which were not about the Marine Corps. Hence, those popular epics such as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Battle Cry (1955), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) were off the table.
Maybe cult movie is the wrong term, but arguing with an editor who is convinced he knows what he's talking about is rarely a productive enterprise. So we'll call them cult movies, but the guy was talking about films that teach, inspire, and otherwise captivate Marines.
The prototype is Zulu, a movie about the battle of Rorke's Drift, between the British and the Zulus in southern Africa in the late nineteenth century. As a teaching and motivational tool, Zulu is in a class of its own and merits special treatment (see sidebar, below).
In a totally unscientific survey, I talked with scores of men and women who had served or are serving as Marines from World War II through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process I detected significant, if subtle, differences. When asked about cult movies, many, particularly the older Marines, would immediately launch into that litany of Leatherneck classics, old and new, that almost always includes the John Wayne movies and, more recently, Full Metal Jacket and Flags of Our Fathers (2006). Others would cite those movies of the horror and science fiction genres that we have come to think of as cult films, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) or Dawn of the Living Dead (1978).
Why Me?
Let me lay my bonafides and my prejudices before the reader. I am handicapped by my own bias toward my favorite movies, and I confess that I am an unabashed movie lover. Also, from 1984 to 1987, I was the Director of the Marine Corps Public Affairs Office in Los Angeles (euphemistically referred to as the Hollywood Liaison Office), and served as a technical adviser on many feature films, television programs, and film and television documentaries. So I'm to blame for some of the turkeys out there, most notably the remake of Invaders From Mars (1986).
Another confession. As a lieutenant, my most harrowing war experience was watching former Marine Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) three times in a row one night on station with a Naval Special Landing Force off the coast of Vietnam in 1971. By the third showing, we lieutenants were reciting the dialogue along with William Holden and Ernest Borgnine, and we had correctly identified the military decoration worn by the German military adviser to the Mexican generalissimo as the National Defense Service Medal (we freeze-framed the 16mm film to verify that).
My favorite movie, which I have watched dozens of times for its uplifting, therapeutic value (I recommend it as a visual substitute for Prozac), is The Wind and the Lion (1975), starring Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, and Brian Keith. I successfully lobbied with Proceedings to include this movie, even though it has some memorable Marine scenes, because clips of it were shown to me when I was a student at the Armed Forces Staff College and National War College. It is more a romance than a war flick, but its action scenes save it from being labeled a "chick flick." Most (male) Marines I know would sooner spend two hours strapped to a water board than endure a chick flick.
The Wind and the Lion, a hostage drama, is loosely based on historical fact. It shows President Teddy Roosevelt (portrayed by former Marine Brian Keith) campaigning with a slogan "Pedicaris alive, or Raisuli [Sean Connery's character] dead!" that is factually accurate. The one small disconnect with history is that Pedicaris was not the beautiful young kidnapped woman portrayed so fetchingly by Candice Bergen, but was, in fact, a middle-aged businessman.
One of my favorite lines from the movie was taken from a scene of Raisuli, a Berber chieftain and bandit, leaving his fortress with flags snapping in the breeze, trumpets blaring, and throngs of his tribeswomen ululating as he and his second in command lead their mounted warriors out the gate. Raisuli turns in his saddle and asks his deputy, "Where are we going?" His deputy tells him their destination, and Raisuli responds, "It is good."
His deputy asks, incredulously, "What? What is good?"
"It is good to know where you are going," replies Raisuli.
Honor and Glory
The common threads in the movies mentioned by the Marines I interviewed were honor and glory. I believe most Marines are romantics, and identify with stories whose characters face/defy death in the pursuit of glory, often against incredible odds, while selflessly doing their duty.
Military-oriented movies can have great educational value for students of military history and tradition. As that noted American philosopher Yogi Berra once said: "Sometimes you can observe a lot, just by watching."
Movies also have a telling impact on recruiting young men and women into the military. Periodically, the Marine Corps surveys those who join the Marines and why. In one such study in 1999, movies, at about 35 percent, were the most often cited influence on new recruits. Next in line came friends, but movies garnered a greater percentage than the total for fathers, uncles, brothers, and cousins combined. One assumes the vast majority of those surveyed were male.
Certainly, Marine recruiters know the value of movies to their mission. Master Sergeant Brett Beard, a decorated Desert Storm veteran and now a career recruiter in Orange County, California, reports that recruiters routinely show movies to the young men and women in the Delayed Entry Pool of recruits to keep them motivated. According to Beard, Full Metal Jacket is normally required viewing before a recruit ships out for boot camp.
Spartans Are Winners
The most popular film at the moment among recruits and recruiters is 300 (2007), which has recently flooded the market with low priced DVDs. This action epic tells the story of the 300 Spartans holding back the Persian army of Xerxes at Thermopylae in 480 BC. It is exhibit "A" in the category of Marine cult movies.
Says Beard, "We'll have the DVD of 300 playing prior to P.T. [physical training] for the poolees, and when the recruits are waiting to board the buses for boot camp."
The Spartan ethos also was featured in another film often mentioned by Marines as inspirational. Go Tell The Spartans (1978) starred Burt Lancaster as an Army adviser in Vietnam circa 1964. The title comes from the Greek historian Simonides, who wrote: "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie." This low budget effort was released the same year as two better-known films, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. Still, Spartans received considerable critical acclaim. Robert Grooms, a film critic for the Cincinnati Enquirer, called it "one of the noblest films, ever, about men in crisis."
R. Lee Ermey, now host of Mail Call on the History Channel and whose list of movie credits is longer than the hash marks on the sleeve of the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, puts Go Tell The Spartans near the top of his list of Marine cult movies, along with Saving Private Ryan (1998). Ermey, a medically retired staff sergeant, Vietnam veteran, and former drill instructor, says of Saving Private Ryan, "The movie is so powerful and so realistic, you watch it and you leave the theater just exhausted."
Ermey, who portrayed the DI in Full Metal Jacket, was given an honorary promotion to gunnery sergeant by the Commandant of the Marine Corps. He has legions of fans within and without the Corps.
Hold the Suicide Scene
Retired Gunnery Sergeant Lee Tibbetts, a former DI and recruiter now working at a facility for troubled youth in Denver (what they used to call a reform school), says, "The first 30 minutes of Full Metal Jacket, minus the bathroom suicide scene, were standard fare for serious recruits." He also recalls that Platoon (1986) and Hamburger Hill (1987) were watched repeatedly "for some unknown motivational factor."
Curiously, some movies that are unflattering to the Corps were mentioned as motivational by some of the Marines interviewed. Jarhead (2005) tops the list of movies about Marines that I wish had never been made. Another film, based on a totally twisted version of real events at the Marine Barracks in Guantanamo, was A Few Good Men (1992), but at least it gave us the immortal line, flung from the witness stand by Jack Nicholson as the unrepentent Marine colonel, "You can't handle the truth!"
Other Marine cult movies run the gamut of modern cinematic experience. Captain Paul Croom, a Purple Heart recipient from Iraq, now serving with the 4th Marine Corps District in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, cites 300, as well as Glory (1989), a Civil War story of a white colonel (portrayed by Matthew Broderick) leading a Black regiment of Union soldiers, as particularly motivating. Honor, glory, and steadfast devotion to duty are the hallmarks of both flicks.
Reserve Colonel Jenny Holbert recently served with the I Marine Expeditionary Force in Fallujah. Her choice for a Marine cult movie was Mad Max (1979), featuring a young Mel Gibson in his breakout film. Holbert observed, "Just the craziness of a combat situation and how you deal with it. The chaos . . . The Iraqi vehicles pulling up at the headquarters were right out of Mad Max. It was surreal."
Marine Corps Reserve Staff Sergeant Amy Forsythe has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In civilian life she is a reporter for KOCT-TV in Oceanside, California, so she knows about communicating via visual media. She was one of the many Marines who chose another Mel Gibson film, Braveheart (1995), and who also chose Rob Roy (1995), starring Liam Neeson in another period film.
Glory and honor were certainly present in the highlands of Scotland in the 13th century with William Wallace of Braveheart, just as they were in the 1700s with legendary Scotsman Rob Roy, and just as they are in the hearts and minds of today's Marines. Movies are like a cement in that historical continuum, connecting warriors past with warriors present.
-General Charles C. Krulak, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired),
31st Commandant of the Marine Corps
Hollywood produced two movies, Zulu (1964) and a prequel, Zulu Dawn (1979), about the 19th century Anglo-Zulu war in southern Africa. Both films are available on DVD, and both yield valuable battlefield lessons. Zulu Dawn underscores the perils of underestimating your enemy, but Zulu is better and more instructive. The films are exciting, reasonably accurate recreations of the battles known as Isandlwana and Rorke's Drift in January 1879.
Isandlwana, dramatized in Zulu Dawn, was a disastrous defeat for British forces in which more than 1,300 of their men and native troops died. That battle took place on the morning of 22 January. In Zulu, which takes place at a nearby missionary station called Rorke's Drift, fewer than a hundred British troops beat back more than 3,000 Zulus in a battle that began later that same afternoon and continued until the next morning.
Consistency, discipline, and speed of execution were the hallmarks of Zulu warfare, as Zulu amply demonstrates. Zulu battle tactics, invented by Shaka, the Zulu King who unified the native clans in the early 19th century, relied on what appeared to be a simple if deadly human wave frontal assault that suddenly transformed itself into a devastating double envelopment.
By 1879, Shaka had passed from the scene, but the reigning Zulu king, Cetshwayo, had mastered those tactics and commanded some 25,000 disciplined warriors inculcated with Spartan-like principles.
Zulu . . . My belief is that Zulu embodies much of what it means to be a Marine, to be a warrior."
("Button your tunic, Mon," he orders as the men lick their wounds after another deadly attack), the surgeon, and even Private Hook (a true sickbay commando).
For instructional value, General Krulak feels Zulu is in a class by itself. "It talks to physical courage in multiple ways courage stemming from anger, discipline, duty, love of fellow man, [and] blind obedience." Discipline, leadership, and courage: a valuable triumvirate of lessons learned from Zulu.
Other lessons to be taken from this movie that General Krulak would point out to his troops are "wisdom in war," e.g., Lieutenant Chard's "thinking warrior;" and the selflessness exhibited by the commissary troops and wounded men passing out ammunition, and the sick and wounded who bravely defend and then evacuate the infirmary.
Krulak also noted that the concept of a "band of brothers" is strongly evident among both the British and the Zulu warriors. Good leaders know that whenever you find yourself in great peril, there's nothing like a rich baritone and a high tenor to restore the men's fighting spirit. Historically, the regimental song of the soldiers at Rorke's Drift was not the stirring Welsh march "Men of Harlech" as shown in the film; that was adopted years later. The regiment wasn't even predominantly Welsh as the defenders are portrayed; there were more Englishmen than Welshmen, but that never stopped a screenwriter. So if you are ever leading warriors in a desperate battle and feel the need to break out in song, "Men of Harlech" would be a good choice.
Even though he is an engineer charged with building a bridge, Chard takes command of the defenders because he is a few months senior to the infantry-trained Bromhead, then proceeds to use every available minute and every conceivable resource to strengthen his position. The minister implores the soldiers to abandon their mission and proceeds to get drunk.
Serendipity is not to be discounted. At Rorke's Drift, the British had several hours to prepare. They also had the fortuitous fire in the hospital building, which provided illumination throughout the long night of their ordeal. And, as General Krulak observed, the serendipitous stampede of cattle from the corral mistakenly left open by a British soldier broke up a major Zulu assault. Thus, another important lesson: If given the choice between being lucky and being good, take lucky.
-Fred Peck
Discipline is a key factor for both sides at Rorke's Drift. Former Marine Corps Commandant General Charles C. Krulak, who used the movie Zulu to train Marines throughout his career, cites the discipline of the first wave of Zulus, who march to their deaths to determine the number and range of the British weapons. Likewise, he says, the "personal and fire-discipline" of the British soldiers during the battle was commendable. The British display superb examples of the latter, employing volley fire on the attacking masses and aimed fire to suppress the Zulu riflemen on the hills above Rorke's Drift.
General Krulak points out that the discipline of the fighting men is attributable to the strong leadership displayed both by the Zulu and the British commanders. Indeed, the film offers case studies in varying styles of successful leadership, from the two British lieutenants the resourceful Chard and the aristocratic Bromhead, who briefly vie for command to Chief Cetshwayo, the craggy, no-nonsense Colour-Sergeant Bourne