The movie poster for The Great Raid shows a square-jawed Army Ranger charging through the gates of Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines for the largest POW rescue in U.S. military history.
That's the actor. Add 60 years and you have Bill Proudfit, the real Ranger. At a sneak preview for the movie, he shuffles stiffly by the poster, holding his wife's hand more for stability than romance.
At 86, Mr. Proudfit's manner is gentle, but he says he can still hit a 6-inch target from 200 yards with an M-1 rifle, and wears glasses only for reading. Still, his former 6-2 ½-inch frame now hunches a half-inch or so as he pads down the aisle to a seat in the fourth row.
"Are you gonna tell us about it today?" quips a Navy veteran sitting two rows back.
"Do you want him to narrate it?" jokes his wife, Alice.
Gathered at the Frontiers of Flight museum at Love Field is what you would call a tough room for a movie, released Friday, that claims to depict the World War II raid with "meticulous authenticity."
Here's Mr. Proudfit of Rockwall, who was among 121 soldiers who, assisted by Alamo Scouts and Filipino guerrillas, rescued 511 Allied prisoners, and remembers the whole event with the clarity of a newsreel.
In row six is Bill Adair, now of Dallas, who was held at the POW camp. After being freed, he stopped at this very field on the way back to Oklahoma City, where he stepped off the plane – beefed back up to 120 pounds in hospitals from his starved 106 – and told a reporter: "Whatever you have heard about ... the prison camps is true. They were mean as hell to us." He's a war movie buff who is skeptical that Hollywood could have gotten it right.
Back a row there's Al Halbrook of Dallas, who calls surviving cancer twice "a piece of cake" compared with surviving the Japanese prison camps that still give him nightmares. He expects a documentary and hopes to recognize some of the prisoners...
The Manila Bulletin review is HERE LINK...
Read the whole thing...the good news is that they all liked the movie...other reports note that it is an "old fashioned" movie....which is probably good news...and it's release was noted by Instapundit...
The bad news is that the NYTimes didn't like it...oh well...
they seem to dislike it because:
...it illustrates a depressing similarity between reckless war-mongering and grandiose moviemaking. Historical films with vainglorious ambitions, like ill-fated imperial ventures, often overlook the human factor, a miscalculation that usually results in a rout....
Hmmm...wonder if he said the same thing for more PC "grandiose moviemaking" like Alexander or Troy?
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