A low-budget offering from 20th Century Fox, Battle at Bloody Beach is notable as the only WW2-set movie Audie Murphy made apart from the autobiographical To Hell and Back (1955). Murphy plays Craig Benson, a cunning and dogged American soldier who’s become so infamous a warrior that the Japanese have put out a colossal reward for his head. Benson specialises in dangerous operations supplying and outfitting partisan groups across the Philippine Islands. Benson, however, has a singular motive for his relentless dives into action: he’s really searching for his wife Ruth (Dolores Michaels, with amusingly salon-perfect hair). The couple were on their honeymoon in Manila when the Japanese first attacked, and were separated in the chaos that followed. Benson is dropped off by submarine on the coast of an enemy-controlled Philippine island, with an assignment to find reliable resistance fighters to supply with arms; his local contact, Marty Sackler (Gary Crosby), is a serviceman who managed to escape being taken prisoner during the invasion and has been subsisting on the coast keeping tabs on enemy ships for Naval Intelligence. Sackler signals Benson to land at their rendezvous spot, a wrecked ship stranded on the beach, but two lurking Japanese soldiers force the duo to fight for their lives immediately. Benson soon learns the lay of the land, with two rival rebel groups vying for the arms he’s brought: one is run by McKeever (William Mims), another American survivor who proves to have hopes of becoming a petty warlord, the other by Julio Fontana (Alejandro Rey), a rich kid who’s rejected his esteemed collaborator family and become a gritty freedom fighter.
Although not terribly distinguished amidst the vast roster of cheap wartime action movies made in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Bloody Beach does have some worthy similarity to the stark, efficient work of later William Wellman and Raoul Walsh, and the blending of genre nicety with torrid human melodrama Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller managed in this style of moviemaking. The result offers the kind of punchy satisfaction a halfway-decent potboiler can wield, and more specifically it has that canary-in-the-coalmine quality low-budget genre film often sported in noting changing social mores: the film is laced with interesting progressive rumblings. Bloody Beach was directed by Alfred Hitchcock’s long-time associate producer and assistant director Herbert Coleman, whose only other feature film also starred Murphy, Posse From Hell (1961). The writer and producer was Richard Maibaum, an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who was just about to find the great goldmine of his career, when he would be hired to contribute to the screenplay of Dr. No a year later: he would go on to work on most James Bond films up to and including Licence to Kill (1989). Bloody Beach whips through reams of story that might have been belaboured. Scarcely before a half-hour has passed, Benson encounters McKeever, a rotund, down-market Kurtz who tries to threaten Benson before Fontana steams in with his freedom fighters to avenge one of McKeever’s ravages. Fontana’s second-in-command, a black former boxer named Tiger Blair (Ivan Dixon), remembers his and Fontana’s heyday as gentlemen playboys, and comes to the rescue at the end as the faintest anticipation of a blaxploitation hero: indeed, Dixon went on to direct Trouble Man (1972).
False regime is defeated, Fontana’s noble corps ascends, and Benson is saddled with a gaggle of civilians he must try and arrange safe passage for. But private concerns threaten selfless patriotic effort: Benson discovers Ruth has not only survived but has fallen in love with Fontana, and she briefly pretends to be happily reunited to help ensure he gets the weapons Benson has. The romantic triangle that emerges here could have been very corny, but what makes this more interesting than the usual run of such is the notion that Benson has to make peace with his wife’s empowered independence, manifest not just in her transferred affections for Fontana but most particularly in her status as competent guerilla fighter who’s committed herself to a cause, like the seed of women’s lib, still struggling out of its chrysalis in 1961, being planted in the midst of 1940s exigencies. Coleman does not blink an eye as Ruth mows down the enemy alongside her husband and her lover. Murphy, as he often chose to, works against his own clean-cut, heroic image, with a tense, slightly neurotic performance like those he gave for John Huston. He depicts Benson as a man who’d gladly turn his back on the war once his personal need is met, and who smoulders with fetid anger once he perceives the way he’s been used, disillusioned with his driving sense of mission revealed as hapless, ignoble gag. Coleman emphasises people encountering and trying to overcome divisions and misunderstandings, enacted on a political level as the good partisans defeat the warlord and end the strife that’s weakening the resistance cause, but also constantly in evidence on a far more personal and intimate level, manifest in race and gender, and characters who struggle onto higher ground to find a place where they can live or die on their own terms. The story, a pressure-cooker situation where sharply contrasting personalities and world-views are forced to work together in a siege, recalls many a Ford and Hawks western. But the idea of placing a romantic Calvary at the centre of his film suggests Coleman was operating under Hitchcock’s influence just a little, and the “love is a battlefield” theme is given body as Maibaum’s script deliberately contrasts the central drama with other relationships.
Sackler has become a prototypical drop-out, shacked up in a perfect ménage-a-trois with two local women, Camota (Miriam Colon) and Nahni (Pilar Seurat), “one big happy family” as Sackler puts it. This is inevitably destroyed as the war comes too close, claiming each one in a mini-tragedy, Sackler eaten by a shark as he tries to swim for help and the two women gunned down. Amongst the other survivors is an elderly doctor, Van Bart (E.J. André), and equally weathered mission teacher Delia Ellis (Lillian Bronson), who bicker their way to an admission of love just before fate catches up with one. Planter Pelham (Barry Atwater) is dying of malaria, necessitating he be dragged along on a litter, kept alive by his total contempt for his plaintively insufferable wife Caroline (Marjorie Stapp), as if they’ve stumbled out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The finale sees the would-be escapees besieged, stranded by the submarine’s inability to rescue them, and forced to fight off the Japanese from the flimsy citadel that is the shipwreck, a plot flourish that suggests something more like the kind of regulation western Murphy was more used to acting in. The climax is bracingly unsentimental and punctuated with pithy violence. Partisan warrior Blanco (Dale Ishimoto) dies rather than retreat. A young boy’s mother is casually cut down by a bullet. Pelham climbs off his deathbed with a rifle in hope of gaining glorious death, but is unable to shake Caroline off until a mortar shell blows them both to pieces. The coda resolves the human drama conservatively on one level, but also incorporates the creation of a pick-up family such as Nicholas Ray was so fond of, and in his own way Steven Spielberg, later on: home is where you make it. It’s hardly Bridge on the River Kwai, but Battle at Bloody Beach is likeable enough as itself.
