I've noticed that many of the American WW2 movies dealing with the Filipino theatre of war feel very cheap and occasionally amateurish in nature. I don't know what it is about the subject matter that lends it to poor quality material but BACK TO BATAAN is no different. Perhaps it's a B-movie compared to the A-list features dealing with the European theatre of battle. This one is slightly different in that it wasn't actually filmed in the Philippines but rather in California, understandable as the war was still raging when this was shot in 1945.The film is a stock gung-ho war effort featuring the likable John Wayne. He's not at his best here - I preferred him in period fare - although it's quite unusual to see him unshaven. He plays a single US soldier who stays on the island when the rest of the American forces flee in the wake of a massive Japanese invasion force. Wayne's goal is to persuade the Filipino villagers to rise up and begin a guerrilla war. What follows is plenty of stock action and incident and the odd sight of Anthony Quinn playing a Filipino character. It's not bad, quite watchable in fact, but not one of the Duke's best.

Helmed by one of the ordinary craftsmen, Dmytryk, this movie about the heroic resistance of the Filipino guerrillas poses several times the question of the cynicism: someone accuses the colonel of encouraging ; at the feast of the independence, of the freeing of the Philippines, the guerrilla opens fire notwithstanding there were many kids there. In a way, Dmytryk's movie highlights and foretells the insouciance of the postwar revolutionary guerrillas. It's a colonialist tale about Filipinos having to choose between the Spanish, the Japanese and the Americans, who on the face bring weapons, food and freedom (but Dmytryk hijacks this message, as the Yankees also raise hell and instigate actions which bring catastrophic retaliations).I didn't understand the topography of the itineraries, but the same characters met everywhere (the annoying kid, the gloomy Quinn, the colonel, the starlet …). For a better result, Dmytryk resorts to cards. And sometimes the characters have the look of silent cinema characters.The Church is eagerly lampooned. One has the opportunity to see Quinn in a friar's habit. By the shape of the cloak he wears, he resembles a nun. The prior accepts to make a masquerade out of his confessional. One may admire his wisdom in doing so, but also acknowledge this is a very sharp satire. Dmytryk was subversive, and the slapdash script helps him. A few things are exposed neatly: the colonel doesn't care about the consequences of his encouraging guerrilla fight, and he doesn't hesitate to open fire on a bunch of Filipino kids waving Japanese flags.Wayne was eager to have a military outlook, once he graduated from the B westerns, sports movies and comedies. Here, he leads a guerrilla who mainly stirs mayhem, raises hell and opens fire on a crowd made mostly of Filipino kids. The kid dies, a revenge counseled by the Yankee teacher ends up in many Filipinos being killed, the Yankee colonel triumphs. Dmytryk was mediocre, here at least, or anyway a 2nd league craftsman (there are fans of his crime movies, I for one have found his '50s movies stilted and unappealing), but the movie's eeriness comes from elsewhere: it was made more to stir anger and hate, than to uplift, see the behavior of the Japanese troops, but also the pragmatism of the guerrilla in its will to boost revolution at all costs, regardless of collateral victims (the fact is we end up knowing little about how a guerrilla was organized, etc.). The faces have the uncanny, frightening glitz we know from the propaganda movies. The characters have a funny way of pronouncing guerrilla, as if a cousin of gorilla; and all mispronounce Spanish names.In another war movie, made later, where Wayne was playing a lieutenant on a submarine in the Pacific, he got a better role; here, his delusions of military glamor are subverted by his director. Quinn appears 1st as ailing, then as a prisoner, then as hesitating, then as having found again his happiness with the annoying Filipino vamp.The storyline is discontinuous, with the recurring characters popping up; it lacks sense, _unrequired, though, from a pretext for offering patronizing sermons or for hijacking them.While Wayne is pleased to have the look of a warrior, and Quinn's role seems useless, 'Bataan' is Dmytryk's movie. It's a situation of a craftsman subverting and hijacking both propaganda and the delusions of his actors, and an advice to Filipinos to get rid of all colonialists.The duplicity of this take is intriguing. Dmytryk shows several facts, with all the due coarseness of a propaganda rip-off. The Filipinos have been sacrificed for a guerrilla war meant to weaken the Japanese and to rescue the Yankee prisoners. Like the Greek villagers from a Mitchum vehicle directed by Aldrich, the Filipinos are ready to give their lives for the triumph of the Allies and the defeat of the Axis. The hijacking must of been pretty risking, perhaps the context immediately after the war still allowed for such dares. Dmytryk's guerrilla tale has a coarseness which seemed apposite, given its wholly propagandistic aim; but it's also an almost masterpiece of counter-propaganda, with the militarism and condescension's hijacked by Dmytryk, who uses the occasion to hail the ruthless guerrilla and to proclaim the irrelevance of higher principles, which none takes into account.Dmytryk's shrewdness has been to advance socialist ideas under the guise of the coarsest militarist propaganda: the revolutionary guerrilla, the cynicism, the shots taken at the Church (the Filipinos received the faith from the Spanish, who have been a kind of Japanese of another age, but the burgers and the freedom and _civism from the Yankees). So the script has this ruthlessness, when the colonel acknowledges the waste of the lives of those involved, often unwillingly, in irresponsible paramilitary actions or in their follow-up, as victims of the repression.

Big John Wayne stars in this pacific actioner surrounding the defence of the Phillipines. He's fairly young and the solid larger-than-life character he quickly became is just on the cusp of development here.Anthony Quinn lends his ambiguous racial identity to the Phillipinos, playing the mythical grandson on their former hero.It's an old movie, so the violence and cruelty is a measure of what censors of the time (1945) would allow. Lots of people back home had sons and husbands fighting the Japs, imprisoned or returning and it probably wouldn't do to show them how bad things could actually get. Quite honestly; I've yet to see any movie that adequately portrays Japanese brutality with the kind of frankness that we see in some of the more recent movies about the Nazis. It's long past time that this was done, even at the risk of ruffling a few Nipponese feathers.This movie gives a Hollywood take on the conflict. Allied prisoners interned by the Japanese are released full-bodied, fresh-faced and clean-shaven. Likewise the jungle fighters look as though they're on the way to a parade ground. Some set-pieces are stagy to say the least.It's filmed in B&W which gives the movie a nice 'period' feel. The budget seems to have been pretty limited by usual standards. Even so, it still makes for an adequate watch if you've nothing better to do.I personally like old movies. So the £2 I paid at the local supermarket represented something of an investment. I only wish they'd turn out more of 'em.

The film "Back to Battan" starts and ends with the January 30, 1945 US/Filipino raid on the infamous Cabanatuan Japanese prison camp on Luzon Island as the allied troops rout the Japanese defenders, that number some 2,000 to 5,000 men, at the cost of only 4 killed and 21 wounded with not even a single US/Filipino POW being lost in the battle. The movie then goes back some three years to the spring of 1942 during the darkest days of the Japanese advance on Battan. US Col. Madden, John Wayne, and his men are fighting for their lives holding back wave after wave of suicidal Japanese Banzai attacks as the lights slowly go out for the American and Philippine forces. With the US general in command of the Philippines Douglas MacArthur being called back to Australia to regroup the battered and defeated US Army for another shot at the invincible army navy and air force of the Empire of Japan things look very bleak for the American and Filipino troops still left on the islands.The film almost entirely concentrates on the guerrilla war conducted by Col. Joe Madden and Capt. Andres Bonifacio (Anthony Quinn), the grandson of the late 19th and early 20th century Filipino patriot and freedom fighter Andres Bonifacio the first. The guerrilla war lasted for two and a half years made it possible for the successful allied invasion of Latye in the fall of 1944. There's also Anders' girlfriend pretty Filipino radio personality Dolici Dalgado, Fely Franquelli, who's the Tokyo Rose of Minlia. Dolici is mouthing off on the radio Japanese propaganda to the Philippine people but in reality is working for US, which her boyfriend Andres who's totally unaware of it. Dolici puts secret code words into her commentaries to alert the US and allied, Philippine, troops where the Japanese Army is making it's next move.One of the better WWII Hollywood war movies with John Wayne needing help from the locals and also being berated and pushed around by who I at first thought was the leader of the allied troops on the Islands,she sure as hell acted like she was, history teacher Bertha Barnes, Beulah Bondi. There's also a number of really exciting battle sequences between the US/Filipino troops and Japanese forces that didn't come across phony and overly one-sided, like in the battles of Battan and the Island fortress of Corrigidor,where the "Japs" actually won, like in most WWII movies coming out of Hollywood at that time.There were two scenes in the movie "Back to Battan" that really moved me and that had very little to do with any fighting. The first when high school Principle J. Bello, Vladimir Sokoloff, refuses to pull down the American flag on the orders of Japanese officer Captain Abner Biberman and then was hanged in it's place. The second scene was when 15 year-old Philippine high-school student Maximo Cuerca, Duckie Louie, was forced to betray, after being tortured by the Japanese, his fellow freedom fighters and American allies. Maximo gave up his life taking the lives of his Japanese tormentors with him by forcing the truck he was on, by grabbing the steering wheel, to go off an embankment killing everyone on board in order to warn Col. Madden's men that they were soon to be ambushed.The real heavy fighting was saved for last with the return to the Philippines of the American forces under the leadership of "I Shall Return" General Douglas MacArthur in the invasion and battle of Latye Gulf in October 1944. The invasion that culminated, in the movie, with the liberation of the Cabantuan POW Prison Camp in late January of 1945. We see, as the movie ends, a number of actual US POW's not actors in the film from some half dozen different states, Texas Alabama Kansas Tennessee Illinois and even Brooklyn New York. All these POW's who were just liberated are seen ecstatically marching to the trumping and heart-lifting tune of "California Here I Come".