Canon Decampment: Irving Lerner

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Cry of Battle

Alternate Titles: Officers and Men; Grido di battaglia
Language: English
Additional Language: Filipino
Year of Release: 1963
Director: Irving Lerner
Screenwriter: Bernard Gordon
From the 1951 novel Fortress in the Rice by Benjamin Appel
Producers: Allied Artists Pictures Corp & Petramonte Productions

Cast: Van Heflin, Rita Moreno, James MacArthur, Leopoldo Salcedo, Sidney Clute, Marilou Muñoz, Oscar Roncal, Liza Moreno, Michael Parsons, Claude Wilson, Vic Silayan, Oscar Keesee, Hal Bowie, Francisco Cruz

David MacVey, the son of a shipping magnate, escapes in his car from his family plantation when bandits attack and kill his caretakers. He’s assisted by Manuel Careo, an anti-Japanese guerrilla, and brought to a peasant home where the owner’s daughter teaches him some Tagalog words. Joe Trent arrives and mistakes David for his same-named father, who has ongoing trade relations with the Japanese. Joe decides to take David under his wing, but while David wanders outdoors, Joe gets drunk early in the day and rapes the owner’s daughter. David is angered but has to flee with Joe when the daughter keeps screaming even at him. They make the acquaintance of another guerrilla group led by Atong and befriend Sisa on their way to meet Colonel Ryker, whom Careo endorsed for army protection. Ryker sends them on a mission with a guide, but the latter gets killed by the Japanese they were planning to ambush. Joe and Sisa attempt to negotiate for replenishments from town elders, but when they’re told that their stocks are reserved for Careo, Joe ambushes them and takes what they have by force. After Joe kills Atong, Sisa aligns with Joe although she also spends a night with David. Careo returns to the town where they’re resting and presents the Americans with a list of Joe’s transgressions. When David refuses to testify, Careo places both of them under house arrest.

One of the most remarkable overseas productions ever made in the country, Cry of Battle’s reputation has been surpassed by its source novel, also a peak achievement in antiwar and anticolonial fiction. Director Irving Lerner is better remembered for The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), his unsatisfactory adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play on the Spanish conquistadors’ 16th-century incursion into the territory now called Peru and their incredibly barbaric betrayal of the Inca emperor in order to amass the kingdom’s entire store of gold. A victim of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist blacklisting, Lerner may have engaged in pro-Soviet espionage and worked for a producer, Joe Steinberg, who raised funds via his brother Harry (who Anglicized his family name to Stonehill—and became notorious for allegedly paying off previous, present, and forthcoming Philippine presidents in the course of building his business empire). All these complications may have been part and parcel of the Cold War situation, which might also account for some of the film’s departures from the novel it was based on.[1] Nevertheless it’s an impressive, unfairly forgotten achievement, far superior to TRHS and unsparing in its delineation of American sexism, juvenility, and cupidity, factors unbecoming of imperialist aspirants (not that imperialism can ever be justified) and back on flagrant contemporary display in its corridors of power. CoB’s literary origin precludes the staging of extensive combat scenes, which is all for the better for material that requires careful exposition of conditions that would intensify further, after the narrative’s resolution, when the unstable alliance between American forces and Filipino guerrillas would result in a peasant-based war on land reform that has persisted to the present. The contention between old-line lawlessness mentoring yet being resisted by youthful-though-opportunistic idealism is all-too-neatly eroticized in the lead American characters’ competition for the affection of a Filipina guerrilla fighter (poignantly rendered by Rita Moreno), with the two sides arriving at some form of accord by admitting that they both need each other amid their irresolvable mutual hatred. With its paradisiacal backdrop, Pinas has proved irresistible to talents from Hollywood  and elsewhere looking to present war stories, including conflicts that actually took place in the country. CoB, with its intelligent grasp of global politics and unstinting proclivity for the interests of the neglected, deserves to be upheld as the entry to beat.

Note

[1] The acknowledged exegesis on the novel is E. San Juan Jr.’s “Benjamin Appel’s Fortress in the Rice: Forging the Radical Conscience of the Empire,” in Lineages of the Literary Left: Essays in Honor of Alan M. Wald, edited by Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, and Paula Rabinowitz (Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2015), pp. 227–244. The Harry Stonehill story was recollected after his death in Amando Doronila’s four-part series in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, all uploaded on the periodical’s website: “Stonehill and Pork: Prelude to Farce?” (September 9, 2013); “The Inside Story of the Raids on Stonehill Firms” (September 10, 2013); “The Curse of Stonehill’s ‘Blue Book’” (September 12, 2013); and “[Jose W.] Diokno Sacked, Key Witness Murdered” (September 20, 2013).

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