Friday's Old Fashioned: Battle Circus (1953)

“Battle Circus” takes its title from a MASH unit during the Korean War overseen by Chief Surgeon Jed Webbe (Humphrey Bogart), which is frequently on the move due to enemy movements, forced to roll up its tents, gather its considerable supplies, round up its myriad patients, trek to a new location, get re-settled there and then one, two, three, four days later do it all over again, just like the circus. That also, however, suggests a certain amount of fun, macabre or otherwise, a la Robert Altman’s famed 1970 film, “MASH”, and the beloved television series that followed in its footsteps. And though there are glimmers of such fun, particularly in an early scene inside the nurse’s tent where Lt. Ruth McCara (June Allyson) gets to know everyone, “Battle Circus”, directed by Richard Brooks, does not evince a humorously macabre air so much as one that wavers, oddly, between plain macabre and sweet, a dark-hearted docudrama and a romantic comedy, the waffling tone epitomized in the dueling lead performances of Allyson and Bogart.

TCM indicates that Allyson took the role to help shed her so-called Girl Next Door image. Yet she is introduced blundering into harm’s way and then resisting the overtures of Webbe, adherent to a strict moral code that feels suspiciously like a Girl Next Door. What’s more, her chemistry with Bogart is all wrong. His character spends most of his time making passes at her, drunken or otherwise, which is not played by Bogart as “it was different time” indecorum, like some oafish sitcom character, but real edge at decided odds with Allyson’s innocence, making him seem like a lecherous predator, which Bogart’s leering smile suggests was intentional. This is well done, in its unsettling way, and in need of a more iron-willed co-star for bawdy give and take, while their occasional comical encounters feel cut and pasted from a different movie entirely.

A comedy “Battle Circus” mostly isn’t, particularly in scenes of surgery, which Brooks films with maximum gravitas, not simply to demonstrate Webbe’s ability to curtail his drinking when a patient’s life in his hands but to give us a true glimpse of wartime triage. Here you can sense an alternate movie that Brooks might have yearned for, with no comedy whatsoever, just war and what it does to those who go through it. There is a sequence inside the medical tent where a Korean prisoner, mentally undone by the noise of the operating room, filmed in a series of quick cuts making clear this unraveling, leaps from the table, gets hold of a grenade and threatens to send the whole place sky high. He’s talked down by Ruth, suggesting it’s a sequence to lend her character a sense of heroism, though it’s more notable for the atmospheric terror it engenders, essentially stripping these ostensible enemies of that classification and rendering them equally desperate.

A scene in which Webbe overrules the Camp Commander and performs an all-night open-heart surgery, the hours and manpower required be damned, evokes not simply the toll of operation but the weariness of war itself, which is burning out Webbe and which suitably manifests itself in both his drunkenness and lecherousness. At one point his character is made to lament the possibility of the Korean War becoming the third World War, an interesting line that puts into perspective how this movie must have felt in its time, released into the era of the war itself. That release date, however, also seems to portend the movie’s conclusion as Webbe, with Ruth’s aid, gives up the bottle and eventually guides his Battle Circus to safety through a war zone, something less than the fog of war and more like the battlefield as inspirational grounds for becoming a new man. Uncle Sam gives it two thumbs up.