You have to understand something about the way I watch television to fully appreciate why Combat! makes it onto my Top Ten list, besides the fact that it's a consistently superior program.
Just because we spend our evenings watching television, it doesn't mean that's the only thing we're doing. For instance, I'm frequently working on this blog with the television on; for all you know, I may be writing these very words while Mannix is suffering yet another concussion. There are some shows that lend themselves to multitasking more than others; it's not a criticism, just a fact.
On the other hand, some shows absolutely demand your attention—they engage all your senses, and don't let go until the episode is over. Combat! is one of those; I look forward to watching it each week, and it has my undivided attention for the full hour. That's a measure of how good it is: the dialogue, the cinematography, the framing of each shot, the music: it all becomes a sensory experience, an essential part of experiencing the show. Combat!, in its intensity, its storytelling, its performances, in the way it makes you think, is such a series; it engages, and it doesn't let go. That doesn't make it unique among the shows in our collection; it does make it good.
Combat!, properly understood, is not a war drama; rather, it's a drama about men during war. Without being strident or sanctimonious, as was often the case with a show like M*A*S*H, it manages to be both a forceful antiwar statement and a reminder of why war is sometimes necessary. It's also a tribute to the bravery of those men who put their lives on the line, often in situations that seem to make no sense, in defense of their country.
Oddly enough, I don't have any specific memories of having watched Combat! while I was growing up, unlike other shows that were set in World War II, Twelve O'clock High, The Rat Patrol, Hogan's Heroes, and McHale's Navy. And yet I must have been familiar with it; I recognized the ads for it in the old TV Guides, and when Vic Morrow was killed while filiming the Twilight Zone movie, I immediately associated him with Combat!. It wasn't until the show was featured on the late, lamented KXLI, which branded itself as "TV Heaven." Combat! was a part of the regular schedule, as well as the subject of occasional weekend marathons, and that's where I became reacquainted with it. Still, it took until I bought the box set for it to make the final impression that puts it on the list.
Combat! tells the story of an American unit, beginning with its D-Day landing on the beaches of France and continuing as they make their way toward occupied Paris, and it has to be one of the grimmest, grittiest programs to air on television during the 1960s. It surrounds you with war: when the shells fall, you feel yourself flinching; when the soldiers are covered with muck and grime, you want to scrub it all off your face and hands and feet, if you can even remove the boots that you feel like you've lived in for half your life.* Most of all, it puts you in the middle of a line of American soldiers running toward German lines, running straight at guns that are shooting at you. It makes you wonder what you'd do. It makes you wonder how they did it, day after day, living in a kind of boring anxiety where you have to fight off hours of routine knowing that a bomb or a mine or a sniper could appear literally at any second. How do they relax, you wonder. How do they live their lives with such a heightened sense of danger constantly hanging over them? Why would you wish this on anyone?
*One of my favorite stories, according to the always-reliable Wikipedia: "During the battle of Hue during the Vietnam war US troops trying to retake the city, not having been trained in urban combat, resorted to using tactics for assaulting buildings and clearing rooms they learned from watching Combat!, reportedly to great effect."
At the same time that Combat! takes you into the horrors of war, it also takes you into the lives of these men, men who've learned how to do all the things I mentioned because, in James Burnham's words, "When there's no alternative, there's no problem." You learn to do what you have to do, and if you don't exactly become used to it, you do come to terms with it. These are the kind of characters that make it easy for viewers to root for them, to become vested in their welfare, perhaps even to identify with them. And that's before you even get to know them.
The alternate leads in Combat! are Rick Jason, who plays the leader of the platoon, Lieutenant Hanley; and Vic Morrow, who plays the veteran Sergeant Saunders. The episodes starring Morrow generally focus on the missions of him and his men, checking out seemingly deserted towns or doing reconnaissance work to sniff out German troop locations; Jason's episodes deal with the challenges of being in command or leading special missions. Each will occasionally appear in the other's episodes, although in a more incidental role, and many of the stories are built around guest stars and their own stories; it's a mark of the excellence of the writing and acting that the stories of rear echelon replacements, played by character actors, can be as engrossing as that of a tank commander, played by Jeffrey Hunter, who before the war was a failed priest.
It's often the case with a superior show that one episode typifies its sustained excellence, and in the case of Combat!, that episode comes from the very first season, the Robert Altman-directed "I Swear by Apollo," which finds the squad holed up in a French convent with a gravely injured member of the Resistance. Their mission is to get him to French intelligence so he can give them vital information. Without a doctor of their own, they are forced to kidnap a Nazi doctor to perform life-saving surgery. Virtually the entire final act is conducted in silence—no music, no dialog, only the sound of the Frenchman’s labored breathing. Altman’s hand is evident in the way the story cuts between scenes of the surgery, the soldiers watching as burning candles drip wax, the contemplative nuns silently praying in their chapel, the sweat on the brow of the doctor (Sanders has threatened to kill him if he allows the Frenchman to die) and a large Crucifix mounted on the wall, with the crucified Christ looking down on the makeshift operating room; the blood He sheds may well be the blood of the gravely-injured Frenchman.
It’s gripping television; there is no guarantee that the patient will survive the operation, and the confidence that viewers have when watching a regular cast member in the same situation is nowhere present here. In the end, the Frenchman lives—and as the doctor prepares to leave (it would have been against the rules of engagement to take a non-combatant prisoner), he asks Saunders whether he would have cared about the Frenchman so much if he didn’t have military information; Saunders, in turn, asks him if he would have worked as hard to save the Frenchman's life without Saunders' threat of death. The war takes its toll on the living as well as the dead, a message that comes through in virtually every episode of the series.
Combat! runs for five seasons—longer, as more than one person has pointed out, than the actual campaign that took the troops from D-Day to Paris. For the final season, the show transitions from black-and-white to color, and I don't think the series is served well by that change—warfare, like pool halls, is more fitting when it's done in B&W, not to mention color makes it a bit easier to tell when they're shooting on a backlot. Regardless, there's a weight to the battle scenes and the drama that still comes through, that still makes Combat! television's definitive drama about men in war. And that's enough to earn a spot on anyone's Top Ten. TV
Good writing is what the show had. It was a drama about the human cost of war. Whether it be soldier or civilian.
ReplyDeleteAnd your opening paragraphs are correct. Some shows are what I call 'exercise shows'. They don't require a lot of attention while I sweat away on the exercise bike (any show with a collection of action scenes in search of a story). Others require my attention if I hope to follow along. And it better be worth that attention. Combat was such a show.