The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell Blu-ray Review
Look! Up in the sky!
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, July 31, 2013
Otto Preminger's name will probably forever be linked mostly to films like
Laura and
Anatomy of a Murder, but merely mentioning those two exceedingly disparate
entries in tandem proves what a wide ranging director Preminger was. Preminger loved to push the envelope, even if
by modern standards the envelope seem positively quaint (it's almost funny to look back on the brouhaha Preminger's
The Moon is Blue caused in the early fifties). At times a deliberate
provocateur in films like
The Man
With the Golden Arm (Preminger's first film after
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell), Preminger could also be
kind of rote at times (
River of No
Return) and late in his career he devolved into something approaching self-parody (
Skidoo).
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell probably tips
slightly toward the rote end of the Preminger spectrum, but in one way it's a rather interesting film, at least when
looked at within the context of what was soon to come from the famous director. In 1957 Preminger would come in for
some major critical brickbats when he cast the young unknown Jean Seberg in the title role of
Saint Joan, a film
which actually has fared better in hindsight than it did at the time of its original theatrical release. In an odd way,
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell seems like a probably unintended warm-up for the Seberg film. Both outings
are quasi-hagiographies (obviously
Saint Joan much more so, as evidenced by the title alone) dealing with a
martyr to a cause, a visionary who insisted he or she knew the truth, spoke that truth to power, and suffered the
consequences. If
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell fudges some relevant facts in order to make its hero less
shaded, it's probably understandable given the film's thesis that Mitchell saw the war mongering handwriting on the
wall and knew modern warfare was going to take to the skies sooner rather than later, even as a fumbling bureaucracy
did everything in its power to keep him silent about his "vision". That salient fact is what
The Court-Martial of Billy
Mitchell wants us to focus on, to the exclusion of some other, perhaps more troubling, aspects to Mitchell's life,
including the well intentioned but pretty libelous statements he made in the 1920s that got him into trouble to begin
with.
It's no secret that all of the armed services operate under a chain of command, a chain that is taken
very
seriously
and is not to be confronted—at least not publicly. In full disclosure mode, my late father was a Major General in the
United
States Army, and while he never publicly questioned his (few) superiors as Billy Mitchell famously did, in private it was
quite a different matter. My Dad was one of the few guys of his generation and status who thought Vietnam had
dragged
on far too long to little avail, and late in his life, when he was approached to be one of the national spokespeople for a
program fostering employer support of National Guard and Reserve employees during the first Iraq War, he came back
from a private meeting with Vice President Quayle lamenting his (how to put this
delicately?) native intelligence. (I won't actually repeat his statement, other than to indicate that after a lifetime of
voting
Republican, he gladly switched to Clinton for the next Presidential election.) Now the fact that a ranking officer might
complain about someone ostensibly in line to be the Commander in Chief may strike some as near treasonous, but
remember this was "private" moaning
to family members.
A case study that perhaps at least a little more closely mirrors Mitchell's from my own personal experience came
years later when General William Westmoreland, one of the few guys my Dad may have confided in about his Vietnam
doubts, came to present my father with a military award. I was fairly young and not especially tuned in to the situation,
but Westmoreland and his wife came to our house for dinner, where Westmoreland just went off on
several
presidents, all within the context of his famous lawsuit against
60 Minutes, angrily saying that he felt like he was
being left to twist slowly in the wind. Now this was said openly to relative "strangers" (though Westmoreland and my
Dad had been buddies for decades). The salient point here is, while guys like my Dad or even Westmoreland would
occasionally let loose in more or less private situations about various complaints, for the most part they kept their
bitching and moaning to themselves.
Mitchell's cardinal sin was airing the Army's dirty laundry in public.
There's no doubt that Billy Mitchell (Gary Cooper) was well intentioned, but there's also little doubt that he repeatedly
ignored the chain of command, to the point where he was ultimately successfully court-martialed. The real historical
Mitchell was a decidedly more shaded character than the All American Hero Cooper portrays, which is not to take
anything away from Mitchell's prescient views about the need for American air superiority as well as the risks outposts
like Pearl Harbor presented to our national defense, but merely to indicate that some at least could see some of
Mitchell's machinations as at least partially self-serving. Mitchell may not have sought out the limelight, but once he
was in it, he didn't especially shy away it from it. That might make Cooper's typically laconic approach to the character
not especially historically accurate, but it probably makes for a more satisfying film experience.
Mitchell's nagging attitude toward his Army superiors is depicted right off the bat, as he butts heads with Major General
Guthrie (Charles Bickford). Mitchell breaks the rules—repeatedly—including dropping heavier ordnance on a German
battleship than he had promised to in order to prove that battleships could indeed be sunk by aerial attack. That's
enough to start the hot water boiling around Mitchell, but things get decidedly worse when a couple of air disasters
cause Mitchell to make his infamous public statement decrying the lax attitude of unnamed brass that is leading to
unneeded deaths among the troops. Mitchell is almost immediately hauled up on charges of insubordination. He's
defended by his friend, Congressman Reed (Ralph Bellamy), though things do not go especially well until Reed makes a
daring gambit that at least temporarily puts the kibosh on the trial.
Mitchell is in fact offered a way out which will mitigate the damage to his career but allow the Army to save face, but as
with all principled heroes, he refuses to go along with it, and so the trial is back on, this time with a slightly pugnacious
prosecutor (Rod Steiger) effectively putting the screws to Mitchell. While there are a number of effective witnesses on
Mitchell's behalf, including the forthright widow (Elizabeth Montgomery) of a pilot who had died when an improperly
maintained dirigible had crashed, the Army plays by the rules, without letting mere emotion get in the way. Mitchell had
more or less called his superiors treasonous, and that kind of statement simply cannot be allowed to stand. It's a
pyrrhic victory for the Army, however, as the brief coda in the film makes clear. Mitchell may have lost the battle, but he
won the war.