It took the U.S. Army 10 months, roughly, to roll across Northern Europe and help secure the defeat of Nazi Germany, 60 years ago this spring. It took the men of King Company's second platoon five years.
But Combat! was not a chronicle of the campaign through France. The hourlong drama, which ran from 1962 to 1967 on ABC, framed moral issues in the warped mirror of war. It was hardly unique in that regard, of course, but it was television's first extended look at World War II, at 20 years' remove still fresh in the national memory and imagination.
At 40 years' remove, Image Entertainment is releasing the series' DVD collection. Seasons one and two appeared last year and season three was slated for release last week. In the mold of such compilations, the discs include optional commentary by directors and actors and written notes by Jo Davidsmeyer, author of Combat! A Viewer's Companion to the WWII TV Series (http://www.jodavidsmeyer.com/combat/main.html).
The first season of Combat! alone would figure prominently among TV classics. From our perspective, perhaps, it seems quaintly slow-paced. It has no "story arcs," and characters mysteriously disappear and reappear. Although the special effects are top-notch, sometimes the MGM back lot is a little too obvious, and the squad repeatedly attacks and defends the same French village. But the black-and-white cinematography is sharp, augmented by handheld sequences and clever camera angles.
Robert Altman directed 10 of the 32 first-season episodes. In his commentary for "Survival," Altman claims producer Selig J. Seligman fired him for the quirky episode. For countless boys of the 1960s, the image of Vic Morrow tommy-gunning on the run emblemizes the series. But in "Survival," Sgt. Chip Saunders rambles unarmed and delirious, his hands scorched and useless, after escaping a burning barn.
It's a bravura, Emmy-nominated turn for Morrow, an intense Method actor who perished on the cusp of a comeback when a helicopter crashed during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1982. (They were estranged, but his daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, has a similarly fierce approach.) At times, Morrow seems too intense because the other actors were more traditional. Saunders' squad was populated by stock characters, like the delinquent Kirby (Jack Hogan) or the "gentle giant" Littlejohn (Dick Peabody)—but each got opportunities to play his character less broadly.
Altman notes that Rick Jason, Morrow's co-star, "was more of a movie actor," meaning he played rather than inhabited the role of Lt. Gil Hanley. But Jason was a fine actor nonetheless. He worked steadily until retiring in the 1990s, but he, too, met a sad end. A week after appearing at a Combat! reunion in Las Vegas in October, 2000, he committed suicide at his home in California.
Jason's restrained officer neatly counterpoints Morrow's heart-on-his-sleeve noncom, but each leavens his hard-assed leadership with empathy, harshly barking an order then pausing a beat and moderating. Each in his way communicates an understanding of the hard moral choices and enervating emotional shocks war forces on men and women.
Yes, women turn up often enough, as nurses, correspondents or French villagers. In the Altman-directed "Off Limits," Peggy Ann Garner plays a nurse, the officer wife of an enlisted man whose life she has to save, along with a doctor, played by William Windom, with whom she's having an affair. Both understand that the soldier's death means an end to their affair, because they would not be able to bear each other with his death between them. It's a moral response that also might seem a little quaint today, when we'd expect the temptation to be to let him die to be shut of him.
Their predicament is as much of its time as Garner's teased-bob hairdo. Altman asks us—as the nurse asks Saunders, to mixed effect—to accept that the whirlwind marriage was itself a screwy, wartime choice and that the affair is not wrong. This would have been harder to buy 20 years earlier.
More often, though, the crux of the story is a character's need to overcome war's psychological ravages. In a New Yorker piece last fall, Malcolm Gladwell compared the war-veteran characters of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (1994), noting that Sloan's Tom Rath managed the sort of hellish memories that destroy O'Brien's John Wade. His point was that somewhere along the way, we've allowed ourselves to believe that emotional trauma is inevitably and irrevocably damaging.
Combat! might have marked that passage. Throughout the first season, Saunders and Hanley deal with scarred characters — the failed seminarian, the collaborationist barmaid, the fraudulent hero— who need not therapy but redemptive action. In the season's last episode, "No Trumpets, No Drums," directed by Richard Donner, Pierre Jalbert's Caje (he's Cajun) accidentally kills a Frenchman and befriends the victim's orphaned daughter. Saunders understands that Caje is "torn up," but also sees he's using the little girl to nurse his guilt. In battle, he slaps Caje and insists he focus on the enemy. Caje does, and together they take out the half-track, machine-gunning the building where the girl and other villagers are hiding.
This transitional ethic animates that first season of Combat!. We are fragile, feeling souls, and merit sympathy, but we can't expect the war, or life, to stop for us. Get over yourself and get on with it. That, too, seems awfully quaint today.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.