Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981) In Mind

Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981) In Mind 

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

As the readers of this site may know I recently have retired, maybe semi-retired is a better way to put it, from the day to day, week to week grind of reviewing film old and young as I just hit my sixty-fifth year. That stepping aside to let Sandy Salmon take his paces on a regular basis did not mean that I would be going completely silent as I intended to, and told the current site administrator Greg Green who I knew slightly from the film festival circuit, mainly Sundance and Augusta when he worked at American Film Gazette, as much, to do an occasional film review and general commentary. This is one of those general commentary times. What has me exercised is Sandy’s recent review of Australian director Peter Weir’s World War I classic Gallipoli starring Mark Lee and Mel Gibson. I take no issue with Sandy since he did a fine job. What caught my attention was Sandy’s comment about Archie’s, the role played by Mark Lee, fervent desire to join his fellow Aussies on Gallipoli peninsula as a patriotic duty and a manly adventure. When I did my own review of the film back in 1981 when the film first came out I make a number of comments about my own military experiences and those of some of the guys I hung around with in high school who had to make some decisions about what to do about the war of our generation, the Vietnam War of the decade of the 1960s.  

While the action of the Australian young men itching to get into the “action” of World War I (which by the way we have just finished commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Armistice that end it 2018) preceded us by fifty years a lot of the same ideas were hanging our old-time working- class neighborhood in Vietnam War times. More than a few guys like Jim Leary and Freddie Lewis were like Archie ready, willing and able to go fight the “red menace,” tip the dominoes our way, do their patriotic duty take your pick of reasons. Maybe in Freddie’s case to get out of the hostile household that he grew up in and maybe Jim like Archie a little for the adventure, to prove something about the questions he had about his manhood. I did not pick those two names out accidently for those names now are permanently etched on that hallowed black granite wall down in Washington that brings tears to my eyes old as I am every time I go there.       

Then there were guys like me and Jack Callahan, Pete Markin who didn’t want to go into the military, didn’t want to enlist like Jim and Freddie but who having no real reason not to go when our local draft boards sent “the letter” requesting our services did go and survived. The main reason that we did not want to go, at least at the time, not later when he got a serious idea of what war was about, was it kind of cramped our style, would put a crimp in our drinking, doping, and grabbing every girl who was not nailed down. Later Pete and I got religion, realized that the other options like draft refusal which might have meant jail or fleeing to Canada were probably better options. But we were like Archie and Frank in Gallipoli working class kids even though we had all been college students as well. When in our past was there even a notion of not going when the military called, of abandoning the old life in America for who knows what in Canada. We did what we did with what made sense to us at the time even if we were dead-ass wrong.         

And then of course there is a story like Frank Jackman’s who grew up in a neighborhood even down lower on the social scale than ours, grew up in “the projects,” the notorious projects which our parents would threaten us with if we didn’t stop being a serious drain on the family’s resources. Frank somehow was a college guy too and like us “accepted” induction although he had more qualms about what the heck was going on in Vietnam and about being a soldier. But like us he also accepted induction because he could see no other road out. This is where the story changes up though. Frank almost immediately upon getting to basic training knew that he had made a mistake-had no business in a uniform. And by hook or by crook he did something about it, especially once he got orders for Vietnam. The “hook” part was that through a serious of actions which I don’t need to detail here he wound up doing a little over a year in an Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam. Brave man.  The “crook” part was also through a series of actions which need not detain us now, mostly through the civilian courts, he was discharged, discharged from the stockade, honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.           

Archie, Frank and their Aussie comrades only started to get an idea, a real idea about the horrors of war when they were in the trenches in front of the Turks also entrenched on Gallipoli peninsula and being mowed down like so many blades of grass. Archie and most of the crew that joined up with him were among those blades of grass. It was at the point where Archie was steeling himself to go over the top of the trenches after two previous waved had been mowed down and then himself  being cut down by the Turkish machine-gun firing that I realized how brave Frank Jackman’s actions were in retrospect.