LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cornel Wilde: Big Combo
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As an actor-director-producer... Cornel Wilde deserves a vote as the most neglected creator in film of the last quarter of a century. Wilde directed eight films, starring in all but one. He began his career as an independent producer with The Big Combo in 1955. In all of the films he controlled, Wilde's character had to face extreme natural and physical danger, and prove himself equal to them or be destroyed. As director and actor Wilde always chose to shoot on location, to experience the danger himself. On more than one occasion, Wilde, a former collegiate fencer, risked death to get a shot.
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Certainly a product of its time (1966), Wilde plays a big-game hunter in Africa whose party is captured by natives after refusing to give them "gifts". The rest are killed in inventive fashion (baked in clay!), but he gets an arrow-shot start as the prey for a group of huntsmen. However, he kills the first one to reach him, becomes armed, and it's a much more even battle, as he makes his way across country toward the fort from where he started out. And it's not just the natives who're a problem; the local wildlife, and even his own needs for food must be overcome. There's very little dialogue after the first ten minutes, since the hero is mostly alone, and the tribesmen aren't subtitled. This does make it something of a challenge and doesn't encourage much connection to them - you could certainly argue the film is casually racist, though no-one really comes off as particularly heroic here.
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Wilde plays Capt. MacDonald, a combat veteran who is leading men into battle on a Japanese-held island in World War II. MacDonald is sick of watching people die, but one of his men, Sgt. Honeywell (Rip Torn), is ready and willing to kill in a moment’s notice. Wilde cuts between images of battlefield brutality and the homefront where MacDonald's wife waits anxiously...and does the same thing for the Japanese soldiers. Beach Red could actually be considered a predecessor to Clint Eastwood’s recent pair of World War II movies, Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), in that Wilde dares to suggest that there’s not that big a difference between the men who fight on both sides of a conflict.
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This bleak vision makes sense especially when one considers the overall trajectory of Wilde's career. Born in 1915 in New York City, he earned a pre-med degree at Columbia University and took up the study of acting with Lee Strasberg. A solid athlete, he qualified for the American Olympic training squad in saber, a skill he utilized in several future swashbuckling roles. After a lucrative career with Fox, he embarked on a career as a jack-of-all-trades in the film industry, serving as an independent producer for a classic film noir, The Big Combo (1955). The film marked the beginning of his own production company, Theodora Productions, through which all of his directorial efforts were created. "I really always wanted to direct," Wilde stated in 1970's October issue of Films & Filming.
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