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For anyone who gets the AmericanLife cable network (fortunately, I do), this week they'll be showing five "Combat" reruns directed by Robert Altman.
Here's a little from the Times article, which compares Altman's "Combat" to David Mamet's "The Unit":
] He was not the series’s first director, but Mr. Altman was involved from the beginning and helped shape its look and its tone, which in retrospect was remarkably sorrowful and bleak. War is hell on “Combat!” and hellishly arbitrary. Sometimes it even is pointless. King Company’s second platoon, “King Two,” was led by Lieutenant Hanley (Rick Jason), but the stories mostly revolved around Sergeant Saunders (Mr. Morrow) and his battle-scarred men. The camera took its time, slowly zooming in on a soldier’s privations and personal turmoil and the trench-forged camaraderie that keeps each of them going.
“Combat!” went on the air 17 years after the war ended but had a Bill Mauldin sensibility, perhaps because many of the people behind the camera came of age after Pearl Harbor. Mr. Altman enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943 and became a co-pilot, flying B-24s over the Dutch East Indies.
Mr. Mamet was a student at Goddard College in Vermont at the height of the Vietnam War. His producing partner and consultant on “The Unit,” which had its debut last March, is Eric L. Haney, a former Ranger and member of Delta Force, which helps explain why the series concentrates on Special Forces derring-do. So does the timing: when American forces are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, a heroic prism provides a more comforting look at warfare.
There is nothing comforting about Mr. Altman’s last episode, “Survival,” which will be shown on Dec. 8. It was shocking and over-the-top in its day. And it still is.
The men in the platoon are captured but escape during an artillery attack. In the confusion, Sergeant Saunders is left behind, tied up in a burning barn, screaming in pain as the flames engulf his hands. For the rest of the episode Saunders staggers like a zombie through enemy-held territory, in shock, his blackened hands dangling limply from his wrists. Whole scenes of Saunders moving wordlessly through the woods in a trance beneath an avant-garde musical score, look like a work of modern dance. (The show’s composer, Leonard Rosenman, gave his compositions titles like “Tortured Crawling” and “More Tortured Crawling.”)
In another episode Saunders is trapped in a German command post with a contentious sergeant from another platoon. “You wouldn’t be afraid of a little action, would ya?” he says gratingly. Saunders replies quietly, “I’m afraid 24 hours a day.” The unlikable sergeant gives his life to allow Saunders to sneak back to the American side with vital information about a German attack plan. Saunders returns, exhausted, to learn that his comrade’s sacrifice was needless: the Allies just cracked the German code and knew all about the enemy advance.
“The Unit,” mostly keeps its heroes out of Iraq, preferring make-believe antiterrorist raids and rescue missions all over the world. “Over There,” a gritty 2005 series by Steven Bochco on FX about fictional troops stationed on the real frontlines of Iraq, faltered in the ratings and was not renewed. The most successful television shows about war dramatize battle from the safe remove of time: “M*A*S*H,” the sitcom version of Mr. Altman’s antiwar comedy, began in 1972, before the Vietnam War was over, and was set in Korea. “China Beach,” which focused on nurses in Vietnam, went on the air in 1988.
The French landscape of “Combat!” couldn’t be more different than the streets of Baghdad, and the German enemy is identifiably dressed in gray. But 40 years later the weary dedication of infantrymen straining their luck on a third combat tour has a special resonance. Robert Altman’s first efforts at storytelling are in some ways as contemporary as his last. |
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