The Americanization of Emily won two Oscars, for art direction and cinematography, and a BAFTA for Andrews. It’s a grossly overlooked movie with a great cast — also on hand are James Coburn, Melvyn Douglas and Keenan Wynn — and well worth seeking out.
In one of the film’s best scenes (you’ll find it after the jump), Garner uses his considerable charm to make what could have been a preachy, heavy-handed scene into something memorably moving. When Charlie meets Emily’s mother, a proud patriot who lives in denial that her husband and sons have been killed, he tells her how he came to his philosophy about war. After enlisting in the Marines, Charlie found himself in a unit invading the Solomon Islands: “There I was, splashing away in the shoals of Guadalcanal. It suddenly occurred to me — a man could get killed doing this kind of thing. Fact is, most of the men splashing along with me were screaming in agony and dying like flies.”
The problem, Charlie explains, is that war makes men brave, while the sensible attitude, the survival-oriented approach, is to be a coward.
“Wars are always fought for the best of reasons,” he tells her. “For liberation, or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and always in the best interest of humanity. So far in this war, we’ve managed to butcher some 10 million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war, it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.”
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