Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, later ended a long and undistinguished film career with a cameo role in a B western that, lacking postproduction financing, was never released in the United States. Divorced, bankrupt, and prone to violent outbursts, Murphy barely escaped conviction in 1969 when he was brought up on assault charges by a dog trainer. For kicks, Murphy used to hang around with cops and participate in drug raids, and he wasn’t above using his honorary sheriff’s department badge to bully teenagers. Shortly before his death in 1971, Murphy fell in with a minor underworld figure who had a shady scheme to obtain an early release for Jimmy Hoffa. The plan involved Texas millionaires, an archconservative New England newspaperman, and the Nixon White House. Why Murphy should have chosen Hoffa as his cause is not altogether clear. He seems to have expected to make some money from the venture, but how is also not clear.
As an embodiment of a dream, however, Murphy has not had the staying power of either Elvis or Hughes, a fact Graham attributes to the unpopularity of the Vietnam war. “Since Vietnam,” he writes, “Americans have had trouble believing or honoring the kind of warrior that Murphy represented. We prefer video fantasy–Rambo–a kind of MTV celebration of American machismo in which the nation wins that unpopular war it never should have fought and which, of course, it lost. Audie Murphy could have had Sylvester Stallone for breakfast. Audie Murphy was the real thing, not some pumped up, aerobicized palooka.”
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Some of Murphy’s kills were heroic, even Homeric. His actions at a battle dubbed Colmar Pocket, for instance, were nothing short of astounding. Confronted by a much larger force of German tanks and infantrymen, Murphy ordered his unit to fall back while he remained to direct artillery fire with his field radio. With the Germans advancing steadily, Murphy climbed onto a burning tank destroyer and started mowing down the approaching troops with a machine gun mounted on the vehicle. “He was completely exposed to enemy fire,” an eyewitness later testified, “and there was a blaze under him that threatened to blow the tank destroyer to bits. Twice the tank destroyer was hit by direct shell fire and Lieutenant Murphy was engulfed in clouds of smoke and spurts of flame. His clothing was riddled with fragments of shells and bits of rock. I saw his trouser leg soaked with blood. He swung the machine gun to where 12 Germans were sneaking up a ditch in an attempt to flank his position, and killed them all at 50 yards.”
Murphy stayed on in Hollywood, however, trying out for minor parts and writing his war memoirs. In the early 50s, he started getting lead parts in middle-budget westerns; he also starred in John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage, a box-office failure. He reached the peak of his career in 1955, when Universal cast him in To Hell and Back, a smash hit.
A sympathetic biographer, Graham is obviously hoping to restore some of Murphy’s reputation, as both hero and film star. Still, he makes no attempt to gloss over Murphy’s personal failings, his foul temper, his bullying, his cruel practical jokes–Murphy once terrified actor Tony Curtis by shooting him at close range with a six-gun loaded with blanks. Graham does seem a little too kind in his assessment of Murphy’s acting career. He writes, for example, that “Audie created a memorable portrait of the American as Boy Scout” in the title role of Joe Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American. But he goes on to mention that Laurence Olivier refused to act in the film when he discovered that Murphy had been cast as the naive and meddlesome American diplomat in Vietnam. And Graham doesn’t neglect the fact that novelist Graham Greene, in disowning the movie that had been based on his book, later wrote that “Murphy’s limited acting ability looked even more inadequate than usual in the company of such seasoned performers as Sir Michael Redgrave . . . and Claude Dauphin.” (John Huston argued until his dying day, however, that Murphy had natural acting ability, describing his work in The Red Badge of Courage as a “splendid, beautiful performance.”) It’s been so long since I’ve seen The Red Badge of Courage that I can’t remember Murphy’s performance, but I do recall his part in Huston’s The Unforgiven, a film about Anglo-Indian conflict on the Texas frontier in which Murphy plays Burt Lancaster’s racist brother. One of his few character roles, it suited him well; his anger and intensity came across vividly. It’s too bad Murphy didn’t get more character parts; it wasn’t so much that he was a dreadful actor as that he lacked screen presence. Short, thin, with sloping shoulders, a baby face, and a soft, almost feminine voice, Murphy would have made a good cherubic killer (Don Siegel thought about casting him as the psycho-killer in Dirty Harry) or a seedy film noir heavy like his fellow Texan Zachary Scott.
