Once upon a time the reigning WW2 battle action movie was this rough & tumble Republic offering, that cemented John Wayne’s glowing image as THE movie star who won the war. The production scored plenty of defense department cooperation to become an efficient recruitment tool — its leathernecks are no-nonsense killers but also complete gentlemen with the ladies — Adele Mara and Julie Bishop. John Agar gets a place of pride in the credits, with solid input from Forrest Tucker, Wally Cassell, and familiar faces Arthur Franz, Richard Jaeckel, John McGuire and Martin Milner. The finish is an impressive recreation of the flag-raising on one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war.

Sands of Iwo Jima 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1949 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 109 min. / Street Date April 15, 2025 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: John Wayne, John Agar, Adele Mara, Forrest Tucker, Wally Cassell, James Brown, Richard Webb, Arthur Franz, Julie Bishop, Richard Jaeckel, John McGuire, Martin Milner, Bill Murphy, George Tyne, William Self.
Cinematography: Reggie Lanning
Costume supervisor: Adele Palmer
Special Effects: Howard & Theodore Lydecker
Film Editor: Richard L. Van Enger
Original Music: Victor Young
Screenplay by Harry Brown, James Edward Grant from Brown’s story
Produced by Edmund Grainger
Directed by Allan Dwan

Quick: What motion picture performance earned John Wayne his first Oscar nomination?  Um … you’re looking at it.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, some of us little kids didn’t necessarily learn much about World War II from our parents. We instead learned a cockeyed version of what the war years were all about from TV and the movies. The TV documentary  Victory at Sea drilled us with the info that it was real serious stuff, that an entire generation had made a major sacrifice.

Movies glorifying war combat were all around us, but the one that made the biggest impression was this action epic from Republic Pictures. The tale of the taking of Iwo Jima seemed to play on TV every other week; I must have seen parts of it ten times (especially the ending) before watching the whole thing. And of course it starred the ‘Greatest American That Ever Lived’ in the form of John Wayne. For any 8 year-old Wayne was the definition of the American hero. If he wasn’t killing the enemy on beaches, he was doing it in  airplanes. Wayne could be friendly and sincere, but he also had the meanest stare we’d ever seen.

1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima gives us John Wayne at the top of his form, in his first wave of major popularity. This was the period when most every John Wayne film poster showed him hitting somebody, yet Wayne had become a sharp actor/personality in full charge of his image. He had already produced a picture or two and was angling to get Republic to back his long-gestating ‘Alamo’ project. With Howard Hawks’  Red River behind him, Wayne no longer had to apologize for his acting, not even to John Ford. He’s much better than the script for Iwo Jima, bringing authority and humor to a character written as both a hard-ass and a softie, depending on what scene is up. He most likely directed himself in Iwo Jima, which was probably not a problem for the veteran director Allan Dwan.

Allan Dwan may have been the original Hollywood director. He was one of the very first directors to shoot in California, before even Cecil B.De Mille. His name is on hundreds of shorts filmed between 1911 and 1914. When filming Iwo Jima he was 64 years old, and had twelve more years of moviemaking in him.

Sands of Iwo Jima is one of the first postwar movies to take a patriotic look back at the conflict without a social comment angle. After V-J Day was announced there passed three or so years in which war-themed pictures were out of fashion; people had simply had enough of the subject. Films noir about returning soldiers weren’t in the habit of waving the flag, and neither were the first postwar combat features.  Home of the Brave addressed racism in the armed forces, which were technically integrated in 1948, a process that took ten years to fully implement. Dore Schary’s superior  Battleground was a humanistic look at the hardships faced by troops, positive in its outlook but not a ‘let’s all sign up’ enlistment bandwagon. Made just before the Korean conflict, Sands of Iwo Jima is first and foremost a paean to the Marine Corps. It set the pattern for the 1950s, when most war movies were so service-oriented that their content could have been directed by whichever branch of the military was being honored.

The uncomplicated story takes us from a U.S.M.C. training camp to the beach landings at Tarawa and Iwo Jima. Tough Sgt. Stryker (Wayne) gets the young leathernecks under his command in shape for combat. Some strong personalities are involved. Stryker once held a higher rank but has been busted, presumably for drinking and fighting; he’s separated from his wife and sometimes talks with a bitter streak. Young private Peter Conway (John Agar) is the son of an old friend of Stryker, but hates both him and his old man for being hardheaded militarists. Peter wants to break with family tradition and raise his son as a civilian. Insolent Private Al Thomas (Forrest Tucker) has a grudge against Stryker for busting him for insubordination.

Those two Marines give Stryker a hard time, but the rest of the crew is a great bunch of guys. Cpl. Dunne (Arthur Franz) and Capt. Joyce (John McGuire) are experienced and steadfast. The Flynn brothers (Richard Jaeckel & Bill Murphy) are just big kids, always fighting. In only his fourth movie, 17 year-old Martin Milner flashes a cherubic smile. He carries reading material into combat. ‘Handsome’ Dan Shipley (Richard Webb) is a cheerful pretty boy. And the joker in the pack is the wisecracking Regazzi (Wally Cassell).

If the (Oscar-nominated) story of brave men in combat seems rather simplified, it needs to be remembered that not enough time had passed for comprehensive reappraisals of the experience fighting the Japanese. Author James Jones’ first book From Here to Eternity wasn’t published until two years later. The comparatively tame ‘social comment’ in the 1949 musical  South Pacific was at the time considered controversial, touchy stuff.

Sands of Iwo Jima could have been written from the Marines’ book of rules. Sergeants work the men ’til they drop. Some of the jarheads think Stryker is a sadist, although he alternates his snarling with behavior more in line with a puppy dog. To make a point in training, he hits a soldier hard in the face with the butt of his rifle, hard enough to send him to the infirmary. That ‘get their attention with a little brutality’ message was later parodied in  Starship Troopers. The joke there is that futuristic medicine is so advanced, a drill sergeant occasionally maims a recruit to properly impress his peers. The unlucky ‘Mobile Infantryman’ is sent to sick bay. Corpsman!

The Marine Corps seems to be a place where every Marine can be himself, can express his individuality, including Stryker. His troops don’t always call him ‘sir.’ He narrowly avoids a court-martial after starting a fight with one of his own men. Yet the Corps heals all wounds. The same recruits that complain about Stryker also shield him from the Shore Patrol when he’s drunk. By the end of the movie both of the Marines that cursed his name come to revere the Sarge as a great guy.

Lovely Adele Mara ( Curse of the Faceless Man) meets genteel John Agar at a dance, and marries him just before he ships out. Favorite Julie Bishop (Jacqueline Wells from the great  The Black Cat) is a bar girl who picks up Stryker and takes him back to her Honolulu apartment. Stryker takes one look at her baby girl, finds out she’s got a man of her own and backs off, like a perfect gentleman. The message is clear: don’t worry ladies, if your sons and husbands become Marines you can be sure that they’ll always behave like Boy Scouts.

Sands of Iwo Jima has excellent battle scenes, with large-scale beach assaults re-staged by the Marine Corps. The new action is inter-cut with actual combat footage, which of course is several film generations removed and a bad match. Yet the Oscar-nominated editing makes them flow together well. A modern production would slightly degrade the new footage to match the old, something unthinkable in 1949: ‘What? Pay money to make my film look bad?‘  Had they done so some viewers might well have believed that the actors had been filmed in a real battle.

The fighting is still WW2-style stock stuff. Actors lower on the playbill get knocked off first, saving scenes of ‘special supporting dying’ for the name talent. The casualties are frequent and for a time seem fairly arbitrary, which is a big positive in realism — when a Marine we ‘know’ is shot, his buddies haven’t time to do much more than make a concerned face. Even more realistically, after the first battle the combatants aren’t completely sure who survived and who didn’t. Nothing’s that organized and there are other priorities, like getting ready for a counterattack.

We see Japanese soldiers only once or twice. Unlike movies made during the fighting, no effort is made to smear them as stereotypes or fanatics. But not until the Korean War got underway would movies acknowledge that Japanese-Americans had fought in Europe (Go for Broke!). The timing seems politically motivated — in movie terms, the defeated Germans were accepted as new allies as soon as trouble started with the Soviet Union.

Audiences were appalled by the newsreel footage showing the savagery of fighting in the South Pacific. LIFE magazine made a hard editorial decision in late 1943 to publish photos of a Tarawa beach litteres with scores of dead Americans. Jungle fighting was merciless, and brutal methods were employed to kill enemy soldiers that wouldn’t surrender. Iwo Jima shows the Marines using flame throwers, but not battle footage of men burned alive. During the war, recreations of such actions were sometimes treated as an opportunity for vengeful cheers, and dialogue in some films let soldiers vent the wish to wipe Japan off the face of the Earth. The rah-rah sadism and genocidal sentiments made a quick exit after V-J day.

The film’s characterizations are thin but the personalities and performances are quite good. The only time things feel wrong is when Stryker gets his men into position with his usual yelling, after being told by his Captain to be as quiet as possible. That, and a concluding scene in which ‘the guys’ sit casually yakking away, in a spot where one of their buddies was shot just seconds before. The film ends with a recreation of the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising, the source of one of the nation’s most patriotic icons. The main credits say that the actual soldiers that raised the flag, including the noted Ira Hayes, did the honors on film. Another credit acknowledges the Marine who raised the actual first flag on the island.

John Wayne would be voted most popular male star the next year, dethroning Bing Crosby. Everyone is good in the movie, following Wayne’s assured lead. Even John Agar shows some sincere ability. His 5-year marriage to Shirley Temple would last only a few more months. This is also a banner year for modest actor Wally Cassell — he’s a great sidekick in this show, and does similar duty for James Cagney as gang member Cotton Valetti in  White Heat.

The film was shot in Southern California, which makes for the most arid-looking South Pacific imaginable. With a ton of free help from the Marines, Republic stages two very convincing large-scale beach landings, which were the Saving Private Ryan of their day. Sands of Iwo Jima solidified the public impression of John Wayne as America’s greatest fighting man.

The KL Studio Classics 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Sands of Iwo Jima has always looked great on video. Republic Pictures’ film prints were always top-quality. Olive Films released a Blu-ray 11 years ago, at which time I noted several emulsion digs and other minor flaws. These are lessened considerably in the new 4K remaster.

4K simply puts the show in the best possible light. It’s touted as a new remaster from a 4K scan, for the first time from the film’s original negative. The only odd effect is that the combat stock shots cut into the picture now stand out more clearly. Some are not the best quality, with scratches built-in. You’d think the U.S. military would go into all that Signal Corps and combat record film material, find the original negatives, and clean them up for posterity.

Most of the rear projection is excellent as well, even if the artifice sticks out. Only some night shots look a little odd, with the projected material seeming more grainy than usual. The foreground first-unit photography is consistently excellent. Republic really took care of these negatives.

The audio is very punchy as well. Yes, the Marine Corps anthem is heard over the main titles.

The old Blu-ray also had no extras, which makes it nice to see the items Kino has included. Kino also adds English subtitles, which the previous disc lacked. That’s a big plus for the aging Blu-ray audience.

An original trailer is present, packed with hyped text cards. Kids in the audience probably cheered it. The commentary is by Kino’s go-to war correspondents Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin. They’ve covered dozens of war pictures, from losers to classics; this title’s significance rates an extra effort. We get lots of behind-the-scenes information, plus commentary about the real battle for Iwo Jima and its significance in the drive toward Japan. And of course, John Wayne’s acting achievement is covered, along with the dozen or so actors in the supporting roles.

An 18-minute interview featurette called The Making of Sands of Iwo Jima is an older but worthy piece featuring Leonard Maltin, with interview clips from many participants, including Richard Jaeckel, John Agar, and John Wayne’s son Michael. We see film coverage of the film’s premiere, too.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Sands of Iwo Jima
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin
19-minute featurette The Making of Sands of Iwo Jima hosted by Leonard Maltin, with Michael Wayne, – presented here is an archival program on the making of Sands of Iwo Jima hosted by critic Leonard Maltin, John Agar, Richard Jaeckel and others.
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 1, 2025
(7313jima)

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