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Associate producer Robert Stillman financed the film with the help of his father, without the usual procedure of borrowing funds from banks. The majority of the film was made on indoor sets, except for the climax that took place on Malibu beach with a former navy PT boat. The film was completed in thirty days, for the cost of US$525,000, with Kramer using three different units at the same time. Producer Stanley Kramer filmed in secrecy under the working title of High Noon. When Laurents sold the rights to Hollywood, he was told that the lead character would be turned from Jewish into black because "Jews have been done". The drama about anti-Semitism in the military opened on Broadway on December 27, 1945, and ran for 69 performances. After his discharge, he wrote a play called Home of the Brave in nine consecutive nights that was inspired by a photograph of GIs in a South Pacific jungle. At the end of the movie, Mingo and Moss decide to go into business together as a civilians.Īrthur Laurents spent World War II with the Army Pictorial Service based at the film studio in Astoria, Queens, and rose to the rank of sergeant. From this point on, Moss will never again bow to prejudice.
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In the film's climax, the doctor forces Moss to overcome his paralysis by yelling a racial slur. carries Moss to the returning PT boat that covers the men with its twin. In a firefight with the Japanese, Mingo is wounded in the arm, and Moss is unable to walk. Finch later escapes but he dies in Moss's arms. They force Finch to cry out to the patrol. When the patrol is discovered, Finch is left behind and captured by the Japanese.
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(Brodie) and the sturdy but troubled Sergeant Mingo (Lovejoy). The patrol is led by a young major (Dick), and includes Moss's lifelong friend Finch (Bridges), whose death leaves him racked with guilt bigot Corporal T.J. The film uses flashback techniques to show Moss, an Engineer topography specialist assigned to a reconnaissance patrol who are clandestinely landed from a PT boat on a Japanese-held island in the South Pacific to prepare the island for a major amphibious landing. Undergoing psychoanalysis by an Army psychiatrist (Corey), paralyzed Black war veteran Private Peter Moss (Edwards) begins to walk again only when he confronts his fear of forever being an "outsider".
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