The Fighting Sullivans

There are war films that derive their dramatic potency from battlefields, explosions and the intricate choreography of military strategy; and there are others that recognise that the true emotional cost of war is measured not in ships sunk or territories conquered, but in the homes left suddenly bereft. Lloyd Bacon’s The Fighting Sullivans (1944) belongs emphatically to the latter category. Despite its martial title, it is scarcely a conventional combat film. Its real subject is not warfare but family: brotherhood, patriotism, sacrifice, duty, and the devastating human toll exacted by military conflict. Based on the true story of the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who served together aboard the USS Juneau and perished during the Guadalcanal campaign in November 1942, the film transforms a wartime tragedy into an affecting meditation on the ties that bind a family together — and the grief that follows when those ties are violently severed.

The film begins a world away from the Pacific battlefield, in the unassuming Midwestern town of Waterloo, Iowa, where Thomas Sullivan (Thomas Mitchell) and Alleta Sullivan (Selena Royle) raise their five sons — George (James Cardwell), Frank (John Campbell), Joe (George Offerman), Matt (John Alvin) and Al (Edward Ryan) — alongside their daughter Genevieve (Trudy Marshall). The brothers are presented almost as a single organism: quarrelsome, competitive, mischievous and occasionally exasperating, yet bound to one another by an attachment that seems absolute. Bacon devotes considerable screen time to their childhood and adolescence, allowing us to inhabit the domestic universe from which the subsequent tragedy will wrench them.

Their father, Tom Sullivan, is a stern yet affectionate railroad worker, a man whose love is expressed less through demonstrative tenderness than through responsibility, discipline and steadfastness. Their mother, Alleta, is the emotional fulcrum of the household, the nurturing presence around which the family’s domestic life revolves. Their Catholic upbringing, neighbourhood relationships and everyday experiences create a portrait of working-class American life during the Depression, at once modest and deeply rooted in familial affection.

Then comes Pearl Harbor, and with it the inexorable intrusion of history into private life. The five brothers decide to enlist in the Navy, but insist upon serving together. Their request is granted, and all five eventually find themselves aboard the Juneau. What initially appears an expression of fraternal loyalty is transformed, with the benefit of hindsight, into the tragic precondition of their fate.

The film’s final movement takes us into the Pacific and culminates in the destruction of the Juneau during the Guadalcanal campaign. Yet Bacon wisely resists turning the sinking into an extended spectacle. The real emotional climax occurs afterwards, when the devastating news reaches Iowa: all five Sullivan brothers have been lost. The film then returns to the family home, where grief is registered not through extravagant histrionics but through the painful persistence of ordinary life. Tom Sullivan eventually returns to his work, while the family participates in the launching of the destroyer USS The Sullivans, named in honour of the brothers.

The structure of the film is consequently rather unusual — and dramatically astute. Bacon spends far more time showing us what the brothers lived for than how they died. Much of the film’s 111–112-minute running time is devoted to childhood, adolescence, romance, family squabbles, religious observance, neighbourhood life and the brothers’ various escapades. Only a relatively small portion is devoted to military action. Yet this is precisely why the tragedy acquires its emotional force.

Had Bacon introduced the brothers principally as uniformed servicemen, they might have remained five interchangeable figures in a vast military tableau. Instead, the film painstakingly gives them a shared history. It makes us understand that their deaths represent not merely the loss of five sailors but the obliteration of an entire familial constellation. Their childhood scenes are affectionate, frequently humorous and occasionally unruly; their collective identity is established long before the uniforms appear. By the time the brothers sail into war, the audience has already come to understand what their absence will mean.

The film’s most effective dramatic device is precisely this emphasis on collectivity. George, Frank, Joe, Matt and Al are given distinguishable temperaments, but they are never allowed to become five entirely autonomous protagonists. Their defining characteristic is their solidarity. They quarrel together, play together, get into trouble together and, ultimately, choose to go to war together. Their greatest strength becomes the instrument of their greatest vulnerability. The insistence upon remaining together, initially touching and admirable, ultimately places all five lives within the circumference of a single catastrophe.

This lends the narrative a particularly poignant dramatic irony. The very quality that makes the brothers heroic to a wartime audience — their refusal to be separated — is also what makes their fate so unbearable. Their brotherhood is at once their glory and their doom.

Thomas Mitchell gives perhaps the film’s most memorable performance as Tom Sullivan. His portrayal is notably free of the facile sentimentality that might have afflicted a lesser wartime melodrama. Tom is practical, disciplined and emotionally contained. He loves his sons profoundly, but his affection is articulated through work, responsibility and duty rather than effusion. His identity is inseparable from his family and his occupation, and Mitchell invests the character with a quiet dignity that becomes increasingly affecting as the narrative progresses.

One of the film’s most powerful moments comes after Tom receives the news that all five of his sons have been killed. Rather than collapsing into theatrical grief, he returns to work. The understatedness is almost unbearable: his sons are dead, yet the machinery of everyday existence continues. As his train passes the water tower where the boys once stood and waved to him, he salutes. The gesture is simple, almost austere, but it communicates what pages of dialogue could scarcely express. The water tower becomes a visual repository of memory; for one fleeting moment, the father seems to see the childhood of his sons before the brutal present reasserts itself.

Selena Royle’s Alleta Sullivan provides the emotional counterpoint to Mitchell’s restrained paternalism. As the mother, she embodies the domestic universe that the war ultimately fractures. Anne Baxter, in the role of Katherine Mary Sullivan, has a comparatively smaller part but provides an important bridge between the family’s intimate world and the tragedy that awaits it. The film is especially interested in the disjunction between public heroism and private bereavement. To the nation, the Sullivan brothers become symbols of patriotic sacrifice; to their mother, they remain simply — and irrevocably — her five sons. That distinction lends the film much of its emotional resonance.

Lloyd Bacon’s direction is classical, straightforward and conspicuously unpretentious. There is little in the way of stylistic experimentation, nor does Bacon attempt to transform the material into an avant-garde meditation upon the nature of warfare. Instead, he relies upon the established grammar of Hollywood storytelling: lucid characterisation, episodic domestic scenes, humour, sentiment and carefully calibrated emotional climaxes. His principal objective is not to interrogate war philosophically but to make the audience remember the Sullivan brothers, identify with their parents and comprehend the magnitude of their loss within the larger national narrative.

Lucien Andriot’s black-and-white cinematography is similarly conventional, yet quietly effective. The contrast between the warmth of the domestic sequences and the darker wartime passages reinforces the film’s thematic architecture. The Iowa scenes are populated by recognisable images of small-town American existence — homes, churches, railway tracks, family gatherings and neighbourhood activities. The railroad is particularly significant because it is inseparable from Tom Sullivan’s working life.

The recurring presence of the train also acquires a subtle symbolic resonance. It becomes an emblem of departure and separation. The father travels while his sons remain behind; later, the sons depart for war while their parents remain at home. Movement, therefore, becomes inseparable from absence. The film’s visual vocabulary may be uncomplicated, but it is organised with considerable sensitivity around the ideas of departure, distance, memory and loss.

Once the brothers enter the war, the film inevitably becomes darker. Yet Bacon again demonstrates restraint. The destruction of the Juneau is not transformed into an extravagant spectacle of explosions and heroics. The combat sequence is relatively concentrated, and this economy proves dramatically judicious. Having spent so much time establishing the brothers as a family, the film does not require prolonged battlefield choreography to make their deaths meaningful. The emotional devastation has already been prepared.

Indeed, the film’s true climax takes place not at sea but back in Iowa, when the news of the brothers’ deaths arrives. It is devastating precisely because the film has invested so heavily in the ordinary world they have left behind. The audience does not mourn abstract servicemen; it mourns sons, brothers and friends whose lives have been painstakingly reconstructed before being abruptly erased.

It is neither a sophisticated anti-war film nor an especially realistic military drama. It is, rather, a wartime family melodrama, a biographical memorial and a patriotic film woven into a single narrative fabric. Its patriotism is unmistakable, as one would expect from a film made in the midst of the Second World War, but its emotional centre lies somewhere more intimate than national triumph. It is concerned with the human beings who must live with the consequences of patriotic sacrifice.

The film’s most enduring achievement is therefore not that it depicts five brothers going to war, but that it makes us understand what existed before the war claimed them. The Fighting Sullivans ultimately reminds us that every military casualty represents a life embedded in a network of relationships — a son, a brother, a husband, a friend — and that behind every statistic lies a household altered forever. Its deepest subject is consequently not death in battle but life before death: the laughter, quarrels, routines and affections that constitute a family’s ordinary existence.

It is, in the final analysis, less a film about how five brothers fought than about why their lives mattered before they ever donned a uniform. And therein lies its quiet, enduring power.