I could never get with Andrew Duggan, the doctor who trudges along with the Army expedition into Burma. He always seemed so actorish, no matter what the part. Ty Hardin looks good, I guess. His features are razor sharp and he has a hefty build but he's not much of a performer. Jeff Chandler, as the real-life General Frank Merrill, who leads the force against the Japanese in 1944, at least had the advantage of steel-gray curly hair, aquiline nose, a deep baritone, big ears, and industrial-strength facial bones going for him.

Director Sam Fuller was in his stride in 1962 and this is a well-done film. A viewer will find it a character study in the context of combat. There are several brisk fire fights that only emphasize the real focus of the movie -- fatigue and illness. It's an unusual story for that reason alone. It's an exhaustion of mind, body, and spirit, and you can almost smell it.

The film is about the war in Burma but it's relatively modern and more realistic than most of the movies made during the war years. An officer belts an enlisted man, for instance. It was shot on location in the Philippines rather than the live-oak covered hills of California. There are no stereotypes -- no wise guy from Brooklyn or braggart from Texas -- just as there were no stereotypes in Errol Flynn's "Objectiv Burma", of which this is a simulacrum. ("Merrill's Marauders" even borrows some of the musical score from the original.) Claude Akins is the tough and uncomplaining top sergeant who keeps the men together, and there is a scene in which the bearded and played out Akins is slumped against a wall after a fierce battle, his eyes closed, almost too fagged out to move. A Burmese child, and then an old lady with a bowl of rice, creep out of the rubble and approach him. He opens his eyes as the wizened woman offers him some rice and then he begins to weep abjectly. It's a touching moment, especially so, coming as it does from the cynical and unsentimental Sam Fuller.

Francis Stahl was the sound man and Ralph Ayres did the effects. They should both be applauded. The fire fights don't sound like any other movie fire fights. The battles sound like strings of firecrackers going off on Chinese New Years. I've never been in combat but those clusters of cracks and pops sound much like rifles did on the firing range.

Fuller could be a headlong and reckless director and he made some clinkers but this isn't one of them. Along with "Pickup on South Street," I'd consider this among his best efforts. For what it's worth, Frank Merrill survived World War II, but just barely.