My obsession, lately, has been a piecemeal journey into the varied cinema of John Boorman. His works, even his most famous film Deliverance (1972), has been a large gap—in part, I think, because I couldn’t make heads or tails of a director that made both psychedelic science fiction, brutal and nihilistic reflections on violence, and a smattering of studio cash grabs. I’ve found this is where many of the best filmmakers lay, in unclassifiable careers cobbled together over decades, from the biggest Hollywood directors like Frances Ford Coppola to the ones always riding on the edge of obscurity like Monte Hellman. My Boorman watch started months ago with Excalibur (1981), a film shocking for its visual prowess and ability to condense what feels like the entire breadth of Arthurian literature into two hours and 21 minutes, while somehow remaining faithful to the text’s centuries’ outdated strangeness and odd morality.
Every subsequent film I’ve watched has been a revelation in its own right: Point Blank (1967) feels like its vitality was ripped from 1960s Shinoda and Suzuki, and Zardoz (1974) presents a mythological New Age class struggle that looks from screenshots to be a really goofy movie, yet works as one of the most daring and creative visions of the end of the world ever put to screen. These are all his big masterpieces, though, the ones debated, rediscovered, and loved and hated in equal measure for decades. Hell in the Pacific (1968), is a much smaller film—just two men on an island—but its humanistic weight is monumental.
Somewhere in the South Pacific during WWII, a marooned Japanese soldier (Toshirō Mifune) discovers the kit of an American pilot washed ashore. The American (Lee Marvin) watches the Japanese soldier go through his things. These men are stranded far away from the war that dropped them in the middle of nowhere, a long way from home or help, and now they’re lost and lonely, on an island inhabited only by one other person, their ostensible enemy. At first, Marvin and Mifune’s postures are aggressive: they’re fighting a war after all. They almost come to blows early on, where it seems like Mifune kills Marvin, only to have it flash back and play out where Marvin kills Mifune. They’re both imagining their own demise, and decide instead to back off, rather than engaging in sabotage of the other. But this slow killing of each other brings on a realization that if either wants to survive, they need the other’s help. They begrudgingly team up to build a raft and get themselves off that god-forsaken island.
When they find land again, it’s another stark, jungled mountain encasing a lagoon and flanked on all sides by the massive, empty, and deathly-cold Pacific. The pair find a bombed-out bunker, each calling out to their respective comrades. Inside they find them only to be ghosts, remnants of the two armies that once inhabited the reinforced concrete walls are strewn about everywhere: American comic books and cigarettes, and Japanese uniforms and sake. The two find peace in their shadow of war, where they have time to shave and walk amongst the flowers spring from the bombed-out soil. At night they drink together, talking in languages the other doesn’t understand, but still a brotherhood has been met. That is, until Mifune sees a copy of Life magazine, his eyes caught by images of Japanese soldiers on the cover. As Marvin rants to him, Mifune darts through the pages, seeing American soldiers mistreating his own, their lives ripped away and bodies humiliated. Mifune’s enraged. The two almost come to blows again and then…
There’s two endings to Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific. One is a redone version by producers, which was shown theatrically in the UK and Japan, and subsequently became the version for standard home video releases, when as the argument starts to get heated, a bomb suddenly drops on the bunker, blowing them both to hell and abruptly ending the film. It’s a cynical ending, pointing to a certain arbitrariness to death in war, but it’s not what Boorman’s movie is about. Boorman’s original ending is much sadder and more profound: instead of turning to a physical altercation, Mifune holds back again, taking his bag. The two men wander away from each other, permanently divided by the far-off thing that flung them to the middle of nowhere, what they forgot about which let them realize that they weren’t so different from each other, that they could be friends, brothers. Yet when they realize the world outside the island still exists, that they’re not just men but “American” men and “Japanese” men, and that these two categories have been pitted against each other and struck one another with unforgivable violence because of the arbitrary place they were born two, they can’t bridge the gap. The world has torn them apart before they even knew each other.