Murphy's War

Murphy's War is an Eastmancolor 1971 Panavision war film starring Peter O'Toole and Siân Phillips. It was directed by Peter Yates based on the 1969 novel by Max Catto. The film's cinematographer was Douglas Slocombe.

For the unrelated novel by Gary Paulsen, see Murphy's War (novel).

Murphy's War
Theatrical poster
Directed byPeter Yates
Screenplay byStirling Silliphant
Based onMurphy's War
1969 novel
by Max Catto
Produced byMichael Deeley
StarringPeter O'Toole
Siân Phillips
Philippe Noiret
Horst Janson
CinematographyDouglas Slocombe
Edited byJohn Glen
Frank P. Keller
Music byJohn Barry
Ken Thorne
Production
companies
Hemdale
Michael Deeley-Peter Yates Films
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release date
13 January 1971
Running time
107 minutes
CountriesUnited Kingdom
United States
LanguagesEnglish
German
Budget$5 million[1]

The film is set in South America during World War II and focuses on a stubborn survivor of a sunken merchant ship who is consumed in his quest for revenge and retribution against the German submarine that sank his ship.

Plot

In the closing days of World War II, Irish crewman Murphy is the sole survivor of the crew of merchant ship Mount Kyle, which had been sunk by a German U-boat and the survivors machine-gunned in the water. Murphy reaches the shore and finds a missionary settlement on the Orinoco in Venezuela, where he is treated by the pacifist Quaker Dr. Hayden.

When Murphy discovers that the U-boat is hiding farther up river under the cover of the jungle, he obsessively plots to sink it by any means, including by using a surviving Grumman J2F Duck floatplane from the Mount Kyle. The floatplane's wounded pilot was shot dead in his hospital bed by the U-boat captain in order to preserve the secret of the sub's location and of the war crimes committed by the shooting of survivors in the water.

Murphy tries to fly the aircraft on the choppy river water and learns how to manipulate the controls by trial and error. He soon finds the U-boat's hiding place and attempts to bomb it using homemade Molotov cocktail bombs, but his effort fails and the mission settlement is destroyed in retaliation. Later, word comes that Germany has surrendered, but Murphy is obsessed with revenge and plans to ram the U-boat with a floating crane owned by Louis, a friendly Frenchman. This attempt also fails when the U-boat dives under him. However, the submerged U-boat is ensnared in a mud bank. Murphy uses the crane to recover an unexploded torpedo fired earlier by the U-boat and drops it on the trapped crew, killing them. Murphy is also killed as the explosion from the torpedo causes the crane jib to pin him to the deck as the floating crane sinks to the river bed.

Cast

Differences between film and book
  • Murphy is one of his ship's officers in the novel, but his film counterpart is a mechanic for the seaplane.
  • The character of Lieutenant Ellis is not featured in the novel.
  • Dr. Hayden is a composite of several doctors from the novel.
  • Louis is a self-loathing deserter from the French military in the book but a jovial company man in the film.
  • The submarine crew is portrayed more sympathetically in the novel. Most of them are war-weary and apolitical, save for Lieutenant Voght, who seizes command and murders Murphy's crew while the captain is incapacitated by a head wound.
  • The book's end is quite different to that of the film. In the book, when Murphy drops the torpedo, it splits the sub in half and inadvertently allows most of the trapped crewmen to swim to the surface and survive. An injured Vought cannot reach shore and is carried away by the current to his death. Murphy also avoids death during the crane operation. Murphy and Captain Lauchs briefly fight each other on the beach before sinking to the ground in exhaustion.[2]

Production

Development

Film rights to the novel were purchased by Paramount Pictures. In 1969, Frank Sinatra was recruited to star in the film, but he withdrew from the project.[3] Eventually Robert Evans, head of Paramount, offered the project to the team of Peter Yates and Michael Deeley, who had made Robbery for the studio. Deeley says a script had already been written by Stirling Silliphant, who worked on subsequent drafts with Yates. Silliphant later recalled:

Our purpose was to make a flat-out statement about the absurdity, the meaninglessness, of war. So we went for minimal sound, minimal dialogue, a kind of intense fumbling toward death, toward the showdown between enemies who have no further reason for enmity except the blind stupidity and vengefulness of the Peter O’Toole character. And this is why, at the end, in a high angle shot director Peter Yates closed out the film with the sub sinking, the barge sinking, and the river surging above both, covering them for all eternity. Over this he shot a ragged flight of jungle birds, wheeling off, the only survivors of this pointless encounter between men and their machines.[4]

Yates said that he was particularly interested in "the way in which three people—Murphy, a doctor and a Frenchman left in the backwash of war—are really brought together by circumstance and how each character plays on the other and makes them do things that they wish they hadn't and things they sometimes feel proud of."[5][6]

Michael Deeley has said that Paramount became less enthusiastic about the project as time past. Since he and Peter Yates had a pay-or-play contract, Evans offered them the chance to make The Godfather (1972) but Yates turned it down in order to make Murphy's War.[7] Eventually Paramount agreed to provide half of film's financing in exchange for world-distribution rights.[6] The other half of the budget came from London Screenplays, a finance company from Dimitri de Grunwald.[8]

The lead role was given to Peter O'Toole for a fee of $250,000. A number of other stars had turned it down including Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Lee Marvin. His female co-star was his real-life wife Siân Phillips.[9] The couple had appeared together in the 1964 film Becket and the 1969 musical film Goodbye, Mr. Chips. O'Toole wanted to play an Irishman so the script was rewritten accordingly.

Production

Filming began on 23 February 1970 and was completed with location shooting in Malta on 5 July. Filming occurred at locations in the regions of Puerto Ordaz and Castillos de Guayana on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and on set at Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath and Twickenham Film Studios, Middlesex, England.[10] Deeley described the shoot as the toughest of his career, which led to the breakup of his partnership with Yates, with whom he had made several films.[11]

For the scenes filmed in Malta that depict the burning of the merchant ship, O'Toole swam through water afire with oil and with explosives detonating all around him. He later said: "I used to do all my own stunts when I first started. I made it a principle. Everything in Lawrence of Arabia I did myself. But after suffering a paralyzed hand, a bad back, broken ankle and countless knocks, I decided never again. It was stupid. Films employ stunt men (for a reason!). They can do these things far better than I. I refused to do any more stunts. [Then] I thought, well, just one more time. So I talked myself into it. In Venezuela I even fly a seaplane. If you want to see a picture of sheer terror have a look at the shots of me when I first fly that seaplane."[5]

Deeley viewed the film as an action adventure, and says he wanted O'Toole's character to live at the end of the film but Yates insisted he die and to make the film more of an anti-war statement.[12]

Several of the sequences were photographed by cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, including the scenes with Murphy piloting the floatplane and the visuals along the Orinoco River. Especially notable is an airborne shot of a flock of scarlet ibises in flight along the shore of the river during the closing credits. For the extensive flying scene with many shots of the floatplane stalling and veering sharply to avoid obstacles, a camera was strapped to the wing of the aircraft.

Several Peace Corps volunteers serving in towns near the Orinoco River were recruited to play Nazi submariners. The volunteers donated their daily wages to the Venezuelan school districts or other organizations with which they were working.

Grumman OA-12 Duck at the National Museum of the United States Air Force

The Type IX U-boat was represented by the Venezuelan Navy's ARV Carite (S-11); this was the former USS Tilefish, which had been sold to Venezuela in 1960 (the submarine is far taller than a wartime U-boat, and its single gun position behind the conning tower makes it look like a Type VII U-boat). The floating crane was a former World War II tank landing craft. The OA-12 Duck used in the film was restored and flown by Frank Tallman[13] and is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.[14] In the original book, the aircraft was a Fairey Swordfish.

Release

The film had its world premiere on 13 January 1971 at the Odeon Leicester Square.[15]

Reception

Murphy's War was not successful among critics or at the box office. Deeley later wrote "From the vantage of today the film looks dated: nothing more than a string of cliched scenes, centring on a cliched character. The aerial photography still looks good, at least. But at the time my chief emotion was, 'Finally, it's over...'."[16]

Roger Greenspun's review in The New York Times centered on the awkwardness of the plot: "The sense of a film in which nothing quite works with anything else pervades 'Murphy's War,' and it extends from such crucial technical details as the sloppy and finally tedious cross-cutting between things (the seaplane, the motor barge, etc.) and the people who are supposed to be operating them, to the playing together of the principal actors."[17]

A review in Variety stated: "By no means a film classic, 'Murphy's War' stands out as the kind of good, solid entertainment needed these days to fill houses."[18]

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded the film two stars out of four and called it "an adventure story high in production values but low in suspense."[19]

Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "The story proceeds from the detestable to the improbable by way of the uninteresting. Rarely will you see a major motion picture so flat and devoid of tone or atmosphere. O'Toole's performance is all flash mannerisms and unintelligibly gargled accents."[20]

Gary Arnold of The Washington Post called the film "a dim, self-defeating adventure movie" with a screenplay "at peculiar cross-purposes with itself ... when the German surrender is announced, the script turns on feisty, vengeful sailor Murphy. All of a sudden it's about the madness of the plan to sink the sub, which, unfortunately, happens to be the raison d'etre of the movie."[21]

A review in the New York Daily News praised O'Toole's performance but called the film a "sluggish action spectacle."[22]

References

Notes
  1. Blume, Mary (13 December 1970). "A Normandy Movie Invasion". Los Angeles Times. p. u39.
  2. Winnert, Derek (11 January 2018). "Murphy's War *** (1971, Peter O'Toole, Siân Phillips, Philippe Noiret) – Classic Movie Review 6546". Derek Winnert. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
  3. "'Myra' Generates More Publicity". Los Angeles Times. 6 October 1969. p. e26.
  4. {{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/backstory3interv0000unse/page/355/mode/1up?q=%22murphy%27s+war%22+%22peter+yates%22%7Cpage=355%7Ctitle= Backstory 3 : interviews with screenwriters of the 1960s|year=1997}
  5. Photoplay Film Monthly, February 1971.
  6. "Notes: Murphy's War." Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved: 19 August 2013.
  7. Deeley 2011, p. 82.
  8. Deeley 2011, p. 83.
  9. Wapshott 1984, pp. 157–158.
  10. "Original Print Information: Murphy's War." Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved: 19 August 2013.
  11. Deeley 2011, pp. 84–88.
  12. Deeley p 88
  13. Air Trails, Winter 1971, p. 15.
  14. "Grumman OA-12 Duck." Archived 13 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine National Museum of the United States Air Force. Retrieved: 19 August 2013.
  15. "The night 'Murphy's War' got underway". Kine Weekly. 16 January 1971. p. 6.
  16. Deeley p 88
  17. Greenspun, Roger (July 2, 1971). "Murphy s War (1971); O'Toole's head cast in 'Murphy's War'." The New York Times.
  18. "Film Reviews: Murphy's War". Variety. January 27, 1971. 17.
  19. Siskel, Gene (July 28, 1971). "Murphy's War". Chicago Tribune. Section 2, p. 5.
  20. Champlin, Charles (July 7, 1971). "Revenge in 'Murphy's War'". Los Angeles Times. Part IV, p. 14.
  21. Arnold, Gary (July 9, 1971). "The Trouble With 'Murphy's War': It Loses". The Washington Post. B6.
  22. Freedland 1985, p. 153.

Bibliography
  • Deeley, Michael. Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies. New York: Pegasus Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-60598-136-9.
  • Freedland, Michael. Peter O'Toole: A Biography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. ISBN 978-0-31260-362-5.
  • Wapshott, Nicholas. Peter O'Toole: A Biography. New York: Beaufort Books, 1984. ISBN 978-0-8253-0196-4.
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