The Red Badge of Courage

Adapted from a novella of the same name, The Red Badge of Courage, portrays the inner struggle of a soldier recruited for America’s Civil War, played by Audie Murphy, war hero turned actor.

It was to be John Huston’s masterpiece (at least till that moment in his career): the great Civil War movie, based on Stephen Crane’s eponymous, widely celebrated novella about a young Union Army soldier who deserts, returns and behaves heroically in a suicidal battle.

Huston’s original cut ran some two hours. Citing atrocious test screening results, the studio cut the ambitious and expensive work down to “B” picture length and released it only as a second feature. But even that ruin is an astonishing work due as much to the neurotically noir‘ish atmosphere Huston imbued the film with, as it is to the performance of Audie Murphy, one of the US Army’s most highly decorated soldiers in WWII. 

One year after the film’s original release, Lillian Ross published her book-long reportage on The Red Badge of Courage‘s making and unmaking called Picture – which would become one of the first film books bought by Werner Dütsch, the subject of Erzählungen eines Kinogehers (2025), and lifelong Audie Murphy-fan.

– Olaf Möller

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