Clint Eastwood's Flag
by Spencer Warren

Clint Eastwood was first embraced by conservatives about three decades ago as the lone hero carrying the torch of John Wayne (or so it was thought) in the old West and in the urban jungle playing Dirty Harry.  In the past fifteen years he’s gone mainstream, as it were, even winning the best picture and director Academy Awards twice, for Unforgiven (1992)and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Today his prestige has reached a new height with Flags of Our Fathers, which has been lauded in the mainstream press as a “patriotic” movie.  In truth, it is not faithful to the book and represents yet another leftist distortion of our history – indeed, of our noblest chapter.  The film also reveals Eastwood as something of a leftist, as well as a director of limited talent; the acclaim heaped upon him is just another reflection of our dumbed down culture.

In adapting the book Flags of Our Fathers to the screen, the filmmakers obviously have to make choices of material and how they will present it in a different medium.  Here, Eastwood and his screenwriters have chosen to take 23 pages of a 534 page book (in the Bantam edition) and make that the main (or co-equal, with the battle scenes) narrative of the film.  Those few pages are the account of the national war bond tour on which the three survivors of the flag-raising are sent by the government.  The theme of the bond tour, as presented in the book and the film, is how the three boys (aged 21 or 22) and their inspirational flag-raising are exploited by our government in order to make a success of the urgently needed fund-raising tour. Two of the three, John Bradley (father of the author of the book) and Ira Hayes (a Pima Indian whom Eastwood makes the only fully defined character in the picture) are embarrassed by their celebrity, and Hayes falls victim to drink; they feel guilty because the heroes are the boys who aren’t coming home, including the three others who raised the flag with them on Mount Suribachi: their “shepherd,” Sergeant Mike Strank, a Czech immigrant from Pennsylvania steel country and the oldest, at 25; Weslaco, Texas’s football hero Harlan Block, 20; and “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” Kentucky country boy Franklin Sousley, 19.

The film spends so much time on the boys’ ruthless handlers, caricatured politicians, cynical businessmen and shallow glad-handers that (if memory serves) it doesn’t even identify the names of all three who didn’t make it, much less make them full characters.  Completely neglected is the heart of the book, which examines the family and social setting of each of the six from their births to their lives in Depression-era America to their volunteering for service in the period after Pearl Harbor. (Franklin’s last words to his sweetheart, Marion, were: “When I come back, I’ll be a hero.”  And to his mother, Goldie:  “Momma, I’m gonna do something to make you proud of me.”)  The book then recounts the combat of Sergeant Mike, Harlan and Ira on Bougainville, Solomon Islands, in 1943-44 (where my father also served); the training of all six back at Camp Pendleton near San Diego for the Iwo Jima operation; their hellish fight on the infamous island; their part in the flag-raising (actually replacing a smaller flag that was first hoisted without a heroic photograph); and the random deaths of the three on the island. 

If this film had been made before the 1960’s, its main theme would have been the stories of the six as individuals and their bonding as buddies as they were hurled together into a horrid experience we still can not even imagine, told in a linear narration.  This could have been the great American epic of the Second World War.  Instead, the 2006 Flags is a post-modernist’s dream – flashback within flashback within flashback – as Eastwood and his writers “deconstruct” the “false” reality to give us the “truth.”  And their truth is a morally corrupted, hypocritical, racist, often silly country (with a fabricated scene about the alleged cynical role of President Roosevelt).

Fortunately, the tone changes for the film’s final one-third or so. Perhaps to save the box office, the film becomes more positive and ends with a moving image of the six boys together – one of the few poetic images in Eastwood’s literalistic career behind the camera.  Ironically, only at the end does Eastwood turn to what should have been the theme and plot of the most of the film.

It is revealing what did not interest Eastwood: Mike Strank inspiring his men, shouting amidst the carnage, “Let’s show these bastards what a real banzai is like.” And earlier, Mike, who always ate with his company and not at the sergeant’s mess, refusing promotion to master sergeant so he could keep taking care of his boys (which ultimately cost him his young life).  The strapping Mike, who enlisted two years before Pearl Harbor, was a “larger-than-life hero,” the book recounts.  “He was the finest man I ever knew,” recalled one platoon mate, who went on to become a national business leader, fifty years later.   “The kind of Marine . . . they make movies about, “ recalled another veteran.  But not Eastwood.   Mike is a cipher in the film.  (He was the basis of John Wayne’s Sergeant Stryker in the 1949 Sands of Iwo Jima, a rather standard film of its period.)

Nor did Eastwood think Jack Lucas worthy of mention.  Age 17, he became the youngest recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor after he threw his body onto two enemy hand grenades to save his three buddies.  Nor was Eastwood interested in the scene of the bulldozing of our dead into mass graves on the island (a more affecting image than the film’s typical, bloody close-ups).   Nor in the death of Crull, a freckle-faced Irish kid, not more than 18, screaming:  “Mom!  Mom! He’s killing me!”

Nor in the pathos of the death of Franklin Sousley, killed when Iwo was almost secure, after wandering into an area known for enemy snipers; his mother Goldie received the dreaded telegram from a barefoot young boy who ran it up to her farm. Fifty-three years later, Goldie’s sister recalled that the neighbors could hear her “scream all that night and into the morning.  The neighbors lived a quarter-mile away,” the book recounts.

In addition to the moving image at the end, Eastwood’s only other effort at visual poetry is the scene where Doc Bradley finds his best friend, Iggy, Ralph Ignatowski, 18, from whom he had been separated when he was trying to treat him for wounds.  Iggy, the “small fresh-faced boy” who had faked his urine sample to join up, is found in a cave; Eastwood keeps the camera on Doc as he looks into the dark scene where Iggy’s dead body lay.  The horrible sight came to haunt Doc for the rest of his life and helped to explain his virtual silence about Iwo till his deathbed.  Here Eastwood is employing pre-1960’s aesthetics, relying on allusion to spark the audience’s imagination and shock us in a way that literal depiction never can.  However, he should have hinted (perhaps via a brief reflection on the cave wall, or with a silhouette, as an Old Master like John Ford might have) at exactly what the enemy did to Iggy:  The book explains they dragged him into the cave, where they tortured him for three days: gouging out his eyes, cutting off his ears, dismembering his body; Doc found him with his private part shoved into his mouth.  Elsewhere Eastwood shows a severed head, and an extended shot of the bloody guts of some poor Jap soldiers who had blown themselves up, but this atrocity is considerably softened.  (It was one of many that was standard practice for the glorious Imperial Japanese Army, against millions of Asian civilians as well as allied forces, from the Rape of Nanking in 1937 to the rape of Manila in 1945.)  On December 20th, Eastwood has another film coming, Letters from Iwo Jima , from the Japanese point of view no less!  Perhaps he saved this atrocity for that film.  (Despite such detail, an Iwo Jima veteran who knew Doc Bradley recently told me the book is sanitized!)

To anyone who has examined Eastwood’s career as a director, in particular the four Westerns, his approach here is no surprise.  High Plains Drifter (1973) is one of the many anti-Westerns of the Vietnam era, in which Eastwood’s lead character – who doesn’t even have a name – wreaks vengeance on the worthless town which had watched in silence when its sheriff was brutally murdered: sort of a New Left High Noon.  The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) has Eastwood’s hero as a wronged fugitive fleeing Civil War Union renegades, along the way giving protection to a group of other victims of an evil country.  His Reagan-era Western, Pale Rider (1985), is the only traditional, positive Western he directed, only it lifts the traditional theme of the mysterious gunman saving the innocent, pure community right out of the far, far superior Shane (1953).  Then, reversing himself 180 degrees, his acclaimed Unforgiven (1992) is a hackneyed statement of the meaninglessness of violence -- nothing is worth fighting for.  One could draw a straight line from a classic New Left anti-Western like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), which ends with Warren Beatty’s unmanly bordello owner shot, stumbling and dying in a snowstorm, to Eastwood’s 1992 exercise in nihilism.  (Altman is the patriot who commented shortly after 9/11 that the Stars and Stripes made him “sick.”) (A fuller discussion is in my essay “Rediscovering the Classic Western."

Most of Eastwood’s non-Westerns are pretty forgettable, showing, like Flags, the same un-nuanced acting (little movement or gesture) and stiff, minimalist, unspontaneous direction of his Westerns – with, more recently, his leftist slant added.  In his 1997 thriller Absolute Power Eastwood plays a burglar who witnesses Gene Hackman’s whoring president murder his (the president’s) lover, which the Secret Service proceeds to cover up as it tries to murder Eastwood and his daughter.   And in Million Dollar Baby (2004), Eastwood endorses euthanasia, although he claimed that just because he was the director didn’t mean he endorsed everything in his own film!  (Can one imagine Frank Capra or Ingmar Bergman or any respected artist making such a  statement about one of their films?) 

Eastwood’s career suggests a pattern of bowing to the left.  Particularly with Unforgiven , it helped him win one of his two un-deserved Oscars as best director.  And now maybe yet another.  The gap between what Flags is and what it could have been stands as a well-deserved condemnation of Eastwood’s modest, limited, if not opportunistic, career.

Spencer Warren selected and co-hosted a month-long series of conservative films on Turner Classic Movies in 2000.