John Huston and Stephen Crane: The Texts of Red Badge of Courage

Huston, unlike Crane and his readers, had the actual experience of combat before him. What he discovered in Italy validated much of what Crane wrote. Huston, too, would attempt in his film adaptation to reveal the inner soul of the average soldier, but he would do it through his practical knowledge, his sensitivity to Crane’s themes and structure, and, ultimately would come to a nuanced difference in his conclusion.

 * * *

In 1895, a 23-year-old author named Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage, a short novel about war and the soldiers who fight it. It was a product entirely of his fertile imagination as Crane had experienced neither warfare nor the military life and was born 16 years after the Civil War he was writing about had ended. Indeed, even the battle that his characters fight is completely fictitious and not based upon any actual battle of the Civil War. In 1951, a 45-year-old director-screenwriter named John Huston adapted Crane’s novel for the screen. It was an unusually faithful adaptation, yet it is different because it belongs to a man who had experienced both warfare and the military life and who brought his specific experiences to bear on Crane’s novel. And unlike Crane, who dreamed up a fantasy battle to suit his narrative, Huston specifically references a real battle with historical resonance that paralleled a battle he filmed during World War II.

In the winter months of 1943 and early 1944, Huston and his Army Signal Corps cameramen were attached to the 36th Texas Division’s 143rd Infantry Regiment during the Italian campaign of World War II, and they filmed that division’s costly attempt to secure the Liri Valley from the German army. The resulting documentary for the War Department, San Pietro, was “one of the most harrowing visions of modern infantry warfare ever filmed: a documentary that conveys the raw repetitive grind of battle and the grim vulnerability of the men who fought it with a respect and bitterness unprecedented in the history of film” (Bertelsen 231).

It was an exceedingly bloody battle, lasting nearly three weeks, a controversial, ill-planned “frontal assault on an enemy position that is virtually impregnable to frontal assault. The carnage that followed was among the worst of the entire war” (Hammen 24), and a “single minor battle fought for an obscure Italian town” (Bertelsen 231) that had no direct effect on the outcome of the Italian campaign. It was indeed controversial because many military historians and strategists felt that it was unnecessary, that U.S. general Mark Clark didn’t need to send his troops into the valley at all but only skirt around it. Except for Huston’s film (and the award-winning and reputation-making reportage of combat journalist Ernie Pyle), the battle would only be an obscure footnote to a little-known corner of the European Theatre.

“Of all human activities, combat is perhaps the easiest to fictionalize and the hardest to represent accurately. . . . One can read excellent descriptions of men under fire, but never feel that absolute chill that comes from the realization that someone is trying to kill you” (Bertelsen 251). Huston and his Signal Corps photographers knew that chill as they were under fire, along with the soldiers whose work they document. As the soldiers prepare for the battle to come, Huston shows them, separately,

full face, close up – smiling, talking, worrying, their eyes full of deference and humor and fear – in a way that makes disturbingly clear their humanity and the non-military aspect of their being. . . . There are no heroic speeches or gestures. The troops look like tired workers on their way to hard labor. (Bertelsen 234–35)

Throughout the film, we are continually shown the troops as they walk, tensely and calmly, moving toward possible death, walking and waiting. At battle’s end, at rest, the soldiers sit, chew gum and tobacco, and joke, or just sit wearily, all of them looking profoundly old.

During the battle, Ernie Pyle filed his most famous dispatch, “The Death of Captain Waskow,” which ends with this description of the end of just one day in the fighting for San Pietro:

Two men unlashed [Captain Waskow’s] body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You don’t cover up the dead men in the combat zones. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody comes after them. . . .

One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it!” That’s all he said, and then he walked away. . . . Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said, “I sure am sorry, sir.”

Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep. (Pyle 107)

Huston witnessed all of this, and much of what he witnessed found its way into the finished documentary, which greatly displeased his military superiors, who were all for putting an upbeat, heroic face on the images of the war. When one War Department spokesman accused Huston of being antiwar, Huston retorted with, “If I ever made a picture that was pro-war, I hope someone would take me out and shoot me” (Huston, Open Book 134). Though General George C. Marshall officially intervened, stating “this picture should be seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage but rather will prepare them for the initial shock of combat” (Huston 134). Some sections, especially a series of interviews with the soldiers just prior to their going into battle being juxtaposed with “shots of their corpses after the battle” (Hammen 25), did not survive the military censor’s editing. But the memories remained for Huston, and one can see them in the quiet moments before the battles in The Red Badge of Courage.

The process of taking one text from one specific art form and transferring it to another specific and different art form is as common as it is difficult, since film (and by extension television) is forever in dire need of a story to tell. In an interview from 1965, Huston commented on this process:

Very often I couldn’t tell you exactly how ideas start to crystallize. For example, I never start off by saying “I’m going to make a specific film,” but some idea, some novel, some play suggests itself – very often it’s something I read 25 or 30 years ago, or when I was a child, and have played around with in my thoughts for a long time. That was the case with pictures like Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, and several others. . . . Most of the time my pictures begin with this kind of inbred idea, something that lives in me from long ago. (Huston, Interview 255)

Later in the same interview, Huston attempted to sum up his process and his credo in adapting book-literature into film-literature: “I try to beware of literal transfers to film of what a writer has created initially for a different form. Instead I try to penetrate first to the basic idea of the book or the play, and then work with those ideas in cinematic terms. . . .” (257). Interestingly, from the point of view of this article, Huston denied that he created a new text.

I don’t think we can avoid interpretation. Even just pointing a camera at a certain reality means an interpretation of that reality. By the same token, I don’t seek to interpret, to put my own stamp on the material. I try to be as faithful to the original material as I can. This applies equally to Melville as it applies to the Bible, for example. In fact, it’s the fascination that I feel for the original that makes me want to make it into a film. (257)

Viewing Huston’s film adaptation of Crane today, one can begin to feel a kinship with the infantry of all wars. No matter how many bombs and missiles can be dropped on an enemy, the infantry must still walk in and complete the job. In San Pietro, after establishing the geography through panoramic shots of the Liri Valley and looking at a map of the valley and the German army placements along it, Huston gives us our first view of the soldiers, fixing their bayonets and walking into the valley. In Red Badge, Huston opens with shots of the infantry regiment marching across the landscape that will soon be the scene of the fighting. He follows this sequence with one of the soldiers drilling on the parade grounds, then falling out and resting.

The structure of Crane’s book is set along several days just prior to a particular regiment’s baptism of warfare. There is anxious waiting, and the novel’s protagonist, the Youth (Henry Fleming), wonders if he will run from the battle. When, after a false start, the regiment enters the battlefield, the Youth participates without distinction during the first phase of the battle, only to become overwhelmed with fear during the second enemy charge against their lines. He runs into the woods, madly, blindly, until he stumbles on the corpse of a soldier who appears to just stare at the Youth.

From this encounter, the Youth walks into a line of the walking wounded and sees a friend from his regiment (the Tall Soldier) who is himself mortally wounded. The Youth attempts to succor the dying man, but the Tall Soldier wrests himself free from both the Youth and a sympathetic, also mortally wounded, Tattered Soldier, and runs up a hill to die alone, warning the Youth to stay away:

“No – no – don’t tech me – leave me be – leave me be –” . . . The tall soldier faced about as upon relentless pursuers. In his eyes there was a great appeal. “Leave me be, can’t yeh? Leave me be fer a minnit.” (Crane 62)

The Tall Soldier dies and the Youth abandons the Tattered Soldier (who walks around in circles muttering to himself, trying to understand a meaning in his own imminent demise). The Youth walks into a pack of soldiers themselves scrambling away from another corner of the battle in terror and, as he accosts one to find out what is happening, is struck in the head by the retreating soldier’s rifle butt. Wounded and in a daze, he finally stumbles back into his camp that evening, only to discover that his cowardly flight wasn’t noticed and his head wound is accepted as battle-earned.

The next day, the Youth rejoins the battle, this time so overcome with guilt and self-loathing that he crazily attacks the oncoming enemy, earning the admiration of his commanding officer and the awe of his fellow soldiers. Later in the second phase of the battle, he picks up the fallen U.S. flag and carries it into the fight, which is broken up into three more segments. The Youth’s side is victorious, and the day ends with his regiment marching away from the scene of the battle:

He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death [and was for others]. He was a man.

So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers. (Crane 134)

Through the process of his Homeric imagination and writing a full generation after the events of the Civil War, Crane attempted to recreate for his readers the reality of a war equally distant from them, a reality that had been missing from literature. Instead of describing great deeds of stunning heroism, Crane’s ambition was to reveal the inner soul of an average soldier, to reveal that the distinction between the heroic action and the cowardly deed that was so thin as to be almost imperceptible and render the two nouns – cowardice and heroism – meaningless.

Huston, unlike Crane and his readers, had the actual experience of combat before him. What he discovered in Italy validated much of what Crane wrote. Huston, too, would attempt in his film adaptation to reveal the inner soul of the average soldier, but he would do it through his practical knowledge, his sensitivity to Crane’s themes and structure, and, ultimately would come to a nuanced difference in his conclusion.

Remarkably, given Hollywood’s reputation for reworking even famous novels to make them more “cinematic” and “popular,” Huston was able to retain Crane’s story structure, much to the dismay and hostility of the production executives of MGM, the film’s producer and distributor, most of whom could not accept Crane’s character study as a proper story. Gottfried Reinhart, the film’s official producer, lamented:

The picture will start with an introduction that tells the audience that they are going to see a great classic. Dore [Schary] is writing the introduction himself. L. B. [Mayer] says to me the picture is no good because there is no story. I tell him we are adding narration to the picture, but he says narration won’t help what isn’t there. (Ross 171)

In the classical narrative cinema of Hollywood, stories are constructed around events that are linked causally, develop with increasing tension, and are moved along with characters who are charged with specific objective goals that come into conflict with other characters’ clashing objectives. But in Crane’s narrative, the events seem random much of the time (as they undoubtedly would in the chaos of combat); the battle scenes lack any buildup of tension; and the characters, far from initiating events from their sharply focused objectives, are buffeted about regardless of their desires or abilities.

That Huston was able to retain as much of Crane’s narrative structure was the result of a now famous internal struggle at the studio for supremacy between Louis B. Mayer, the head of production for MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Inc., and Dore Schary, the vice president in charge of production. Sensing that Mayer’s days were numbered, Schary backed Huston’s film against Mayer’s wishes and successfully used it as a wedge between Mayer and the New York front office: “Pictures on this scale were normally approved and put into production without comment. But Red Badge became the occasion for a bitter debate. Whoever prevailed would control the studio, and the loser would be relegated to limbo” (Huston, Open Book 200).

In the adaptation process, the only major change to the story was the studio’s editing out the fate of the Tattered Soldier after the death of the Tall Soldier. But Huston made several minor changes that reflected his personal experience with war as much as his knowledge of dramatic structure, such as telescoping the events of the final battle into one charge from the enemy followed by one charge by the Youth’s regiment.

For example, during the first phase of the very first battle, Crane describes one infantryman’s sudden panic:

The lieutenant of the youth’s company had encountered a soldier who had fled screaming at the first volley of his comrades. Behind the lines these two were acting a little isolated scene. The man was blubbering and staring with sheep-like eyes at the lieutenant, who had seized him by the collar and was pommeling him. He drove him back into the ranks with many blows. The soldier went mechanically, dully, with his animal-like eyes upon the officer. Perhaps there was to him a divinity expressed in the voice of the other – stern, hard, with no reflection of fear in it. He tried to reload his gun, but his shaking hands prevented. The lieutenant was obliged to assist him. (Crane 43)

During a bombardment at San Pietro, Huston and one of his cameramen were trapped in a cave:

Inside . . . I glanced over at my cameraman, and his whole body was shaking. He saw me looking at him and said, “I’ll be all right, Captain. I do this sometimes, but I always get over it. Don’t worry about me, Captain. I’ll be all right.”

But his shaking didn’t stop. There was a let-up in the bombardment after a while, and we looked out. Both the Germans and the Americans had raised their shelling from the town to the surrounding country. I knew that something had to be done about my cameraman, so I said, “Come on, Sergeant, let’s get a shot outside.”

We went outside and I had him do a pan shot. He was still shaking, so I had him do it again. This time it was much better. Then I had him do it a third time and he was as steady as a rock. . . . (Huston, Open Book 126-27)

In Huston’s adaptation of Crane’s sequence from Red Badge, now the soldier suddenly bolts from the line and, just as suddenly, is forcibly yet almost gently escorted back to his position by the lieutenant, who proceeds to load the rifle for the soldier and then places it in the soldier’s hands. The soldier then commences to fire, that is, working at his “job” (like San Pietro’s cameraman) and not thinking of the death and carnage around him.

Huston also added several small moments that are not in the book such as the battlefield death of a bespectacled soldier who falls, losing his glasses in the fall, then frantically scrambles in the dust, finds the glasses, and keels over dead as he’s putting them back on (a piece of business Huston invented on the day of that particular shooting).

One particular scene that Huston rewrote from the novel was the finale to the battle. In Crane, the Youth watches as the mortally wounded Confederate standard bearer struggles to leave the field:

[The Youth] perceived this man fighting a last struggle, the struggle of one whose legs are grasped by demons. It was a ghastly battle. Over his face was the bleach of death, but set upon it was the dark and hard lines of desperate purpose. With this terrible grin of resolution he hugged his precious flag to him and was stumbling and staggering in his design to go the way that led to safety for it. (Crane 127)

As the Confederate soldier falls, the Youth’s friend, the Loud Soldier, wrests the fallen Confederate standard from the hands of its bearer and there is a brief exhilaration: “He pulled at it and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to the ground” (Crane 128).

Huston’s change, in tone as well as action, eliminates the Loud Soldier from this sequence. The Youth, steadily grasping the tattered Union flag, follows alongside the dying Confederate flag-bearer up an incline as the dying man struggles to stay on his feet. As he sinks to the ground, he seems to offer his flag up to the Youth, who then takes the Confederate flag in his left hand. The field is full of the smoke of battle, and the wind is blowing strongly. The Youth holds out the Confederate flag horizontally over the now dead bearer, and the wind blows it out over the body as if it were a shroud, while the Union flag flutters vertically. This entire sequence, and it is one of the great moments in cinema, beautifully photographed by Harold Rossen, was done as a tracking shot in a single take, and its effect on the viewer is one of profound sadness over the waste of war.

Here Huston departs from Crane by adding a tone of loss, regret, and somberness to the events. In the novel, there is exuberance and joy and congratulations after the battle is won, and the Youth leaves at book’s end with a serenity that he has earned from the battle. In the film, the closest to any joy after the battle comes from Thompson’s excited report of the general’s overheard praise for the Youth’s and the Loud Soldier’s battlefield behavior (which comes earlier in the novel during one of the several lulls during the final battle, not after it), but it is met with both a sadness and a guilt by the two soldiers. The Youth walks away, followed by the Loud Soldier, and they both confess to each other that each had run away the day before during the first battle. Humbly, they return to the regiment. (Adding to the power of this invented scene is that Huston cast two authentic icons of WWII to play the soldiers: Audie Murphy, the most decorated American war hero of that war as the Youth, and Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist of the infantryman’s war, as the Loud Soldier. In these two men, with their unshaven baby faces, Huston added the reality of their combined and individual experience to lend credence to both Crane’s and his own vision of war.)

Another notable change from the book (though admittedly not one that would be apparent to more than a few) was Huston’s choosing to date the events of Crane’s story. Crane was particular about not identifying any single real battle, in order to create his own truth and to make his battle stand for all battles. All the same, details and battle formations have suggested to historians that Crane referenced the Battle of Chancellorsville, which occurred in the spring of 1862. Huston took a different strategy. In spite of the narration taken from the book that opens the film by announcing that it is the spring of 1862, and in spite of a soldier’s dialogue in that scene declaring that it is spring, when the regiment receives gossip that they are to go into battle soon, Huston shows the Youth as he goes to his tent and writes a letter to his mother. In a close-up, the date on the letterhead reads: September 10, 1862. While not spelled out for the average viewer, this feels a very clear signal that Huston wanted to identify and place the battle as the Battle of Antietam (September 15-17, 1862) which produced the greatest number of casualties in a single day: over 17,000 wounded and over 6,000 dead. Like the battle Huston had personally witnessed at San Pietro, Antietam was extremely bloody, costly, and a virtual stalemate (the Confederate army retreated back into Virginia to regroup). Besides its bloody distinction, Antietam also produced the Emancipation Proclamation from Lincoln, an action most historians today agree lifted the conflict of the Civil War to a higher moral ground.

It is in these small changes from the book and in his mise-en-scene that Huston’s film becomes a separate, faithful, and arguably superior text from Crane’s novel, one that deserves perhaps as much praise for its personal vision as Crane’s novel has earned for its vision. Huston’s text breathes with the smells of World War II and the fears, cowardice, heroism, and silences that he saw and experienced with a single unit of foot soldiers as they walked toward a smoky battleground as insignificant as the portion of a stone wall that the Youth and his regiment capture for a quarter of an hour, then walk away from.

Works Cited

Bertelsen, Lance. “San Pietro and the ‘Art’ of War.” Southwest Review 74(2), Spring 1989: 230-256.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Stories. Ed. R. W. Stallman. New York: New American Library, 1960.

Hammen, Scott. John Huston. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985.

Huston, John. Interview. Interviews with Film Directors. Ed. Andrew Sarris. New York: Avon Books, 1967.

Huston, John. An Open Book. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981.

Pyle, Ernie. Brave Men. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1944.

Ross, Lillian. Picture. New York: Avon Books, 1952.

* * *

Unless otherwise indicated (or obvious), all images are screenshots from the DVD, permitted under the fair-use section of copyright law.