John Dahl on The Great Raid

A list of films set in the Pacific Theater of World War II includes Too Late the Hero, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Never So Few, the more recent Paradise Road and now the John Dahl directed The Great Raid. Dahl’s film touches on a point that never comes up about that war; 70,000 American and Allied troops surrendered in Bataan in 1942. The Japanese had invaded the Philippines days after they bombed Peal Harbor. Great Raid recounts an actual rescue mission in 1945 that freed over 500 prisoners at Cabanatuan on the island of Luzon in the Philippines.
Dahl brings a realistic and sometimes brutal sense of the mission to The Great Raid. His previous helming of modern film noirs Red Rock West and The Last Seduction nourished his feel for action.
Dahl’s classy noir credentials are all the more amazing because the companies involved didn’t want to distribute the films.
“Red Rock West was made by Polygram and had theatrical distribution in place,” Dahl told Free Press Houston during a press stop in town. Another company broke their contract to distribute and the film ended up on HBO. “If you have a movie that goes exclusively to cable they pay you more money.”
A Canadian distributor saw Red Rock West in France during its European release and acquired it for the Toronto Film Festival. Then Roxie Releasing picked it up for their art house theater in San Francisco. “It started as one print … at one point they had 40 prints in distribution,” attests Dahl. “Ironically the same thing happened with The Last Seduction.” The distributors didn’t feel they could release it domestically but then it did well in Europe. “October Films saw it in England, it had already run in the U.S. on cable. It caught on at a couple of theaters in New York and eventually played on about 120 screens.”
When both films were released in the early 90s they became poster children for independent film success. In 1993 (through 1995) Miramax started its Academy award studded dominance of the indie scene. Now a decade and an ownership change later Miramax is releasing several films in the next two months, among them Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm and The Great Raid (August 12).
Dahl found footage of the actual participants and James Franco uncannily looks similar to his character Captain Prince. In the actual rescue mission (documented in the books Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides and The Great Raid on Cabanatuan by William Brueur) the 120 men and eight officers included three photographers. Fascination with battle footage isn’t a phenomenon of cable news channels. Dahl begins the film with a lengthy montage of WWII footage that documents the war in the Pacific.
Miramax owned the rights to Brueur’s book and Dahl (who also helmed Miramax’s The Rounders) explained how an early version played loose with the official version. After Ghost Soldiers came out Dahl supervised a revision of the script that emphasized the events as they actually happened although the love story between the characters played by Connie Nielsen and Joseph Fiennes was fictionalized.
Nielsen’s character Margaret Utinsky deserves a movie of her own. A google search indicates that Utinsky wrote a book after the war about her life before dropping out of sight. “Her true story is stunning,” exclaimed Dahl. “She was married to an American officer who died during the Bataan Death March. She forged a Lithuanian passport and got work at a hospital as a nurse. She organized an underground with leading citizens of Manila. Eventually the Japanese did arrest her. They tortured her for 37 days before they released her.”