Rating: 
Summary: A distorted and diluted version of the James Jones novel
Review: The question asked routinely of today's movies is "How did they do that?" In the case of the original Thin Red Line movie it is "Why did they do that?"Why take a powerful and compelling literary work and create from it a film that would be a perfect choice for the Tuesday Night Movie on network TV in the mid sixties, complete with an irritatingly uninspired musical score that sounds like it was pilfered from a daytime soap opera? The more recent Malick production of the James Jones novel is far more compelling, visually interesting, better directed and better acted; almost to the point of embarassment. The novel, as written, is strongly character driven. It was the way Jones worked and was a large element of his painfully honest writing, the resulting work having a timeless quality. The action is complex and it makes for an intiguing challenge to interpret this work into a film. Reading The Thin Red Line makes me want to see it in movie form but I also see a problem in how to film it and keep faith with the author at the same time: the age old Hollywood dilemma, How do we make an honest picture and at the same time please the audience? Malick took on that challenge with Thin Red Line and came off pretty well for it notwithstanding some disagreeability among critics on parts of the story that are difficult to exploit cinematically. This sixties black and white version, however, betrays a virtual phobia of candid and forthright story interpretation. The idea seems to have been to exploit the novel without disturbing the audience. If these people told the story of Noah, they would have left out all the nasty stuff about the flood and all that annoying rain. In the end it seems not to have mattered. They accomplished their aim: To make yet another fine book into a trite and uninteresting film.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Malick, but still not Jones.
Review: The Thin Red Line (Andrew Marton, 1964) Andrew Marton (King Solomon's Mines, The Longest Day) took on James Jones' best, and biggest, novel some thirty-four years before Terence Malick did. After the desecration Malick released, I resolved I had to see Marton's version as soon as I could, because surely, nothing could possibly be worse than Malick's. I was right... but not by much. Marton focused on some different points in The Thin Red Line than Malick did (including, surprisingly, a glancing reference towards the book's homosexual themes), but in the end, there's still way too much missing for this to be a good adaptation of Jones' gorgeous, sprawling novel of the Battle of Guadalcanal. Marton focuses, as any decent adaptation would have, on the conflict between Private Doll (Keir Dullea of 2001: A Space Odyssey) and Sergeant Welsh (the omnipresent Jack Warden). Someone, however, should have mentioned to screenwriter Bernard Morton (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers... nuff said) that when you're already desperately trying to concatenate a six-hundred-page (in eight-point font) novel into just over an hour and a half, you don't write in extra confrontations between the two main characters or you lose sight of the rest of the novel (in this case, well, the four days of battle of Guadalcanal, which get about ten minutes of screen time). And yet still, in a film an hour shorter than Malick's, Marton managed to squeeze in the whole book rather than just the first half. Astounding. Dullea, never the best of actors, well earned Noel Coward's "Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow" jibe. There were some directors, Kubrick among them, who were capable of turning Dullea's oddly featureless face to their advantage. Marton is one of them. Dullea, by virtue of his complete indistinguishability from your basic eighteen-year-old American preppy, becomes a sort of everyman, while the easily-recognizable Warden is a character all to himself. (Jones fans, take note: one of the movie's true weaknesses is that it explores Welsh's "property" ideas even less than does Malick's movie.) This in itself creates an additional tension in the movie, which in some places it sorely needs. But in the end, both Marton's and Malick's attempts to being The Thin Red Line to the screen both failed for the same reason: the source material won't stand for it. Far too much of the book is internalized and doesn't translate well to the screen, leading to isolated dramatic scenes (needless to say, Marton and Malick focused on many of the same points of high drama offered in the novel) in seas of slow, uninteresting sitting in the jungle and waiting. Still, if you were as disgusted by Malick's heretical retelling as I was, this is worth a rental. It's not the movie it should have been (when someone finally does he Thin Red Line correctly, it will, deservedly, be as lauded as was From Here to Eternity), but it's a step farther in the right direction than Malick got. **
Rating: 
Summary: Very accurate treatment of the James Jones novel.
Review: This film was very true to the James Jones novel of the same title, and a better treatment than the current adaptation of the novel that received an Academy Award nomination as best picture. It does not include all of the incidents or characters in the novel (and neither does the 1998 film), which would be difficult in a 2-hour movie. The quality of the audio and video (black and white) on the VHS tape I received was very poor, indicative of the VHS tapes being rushed into production by the interest generated by the 1998 movie. The acting performance by Jack Warden as Sgt. Welsh in the 1964 film, was vastly superior to that of Sean Penn in the 1998 movie.
Rating: 
Summary: A Great, But Overlooked Film
Review: This is one of the best war movies ever made, and it far surpasses it's 1998 remake. Based on the book, it takes place during the battle of Guadalcanal. Excellent acting, script, and solid action scenes round this out. It not as popular as others like The Longest Day, but it's just as good. Check it out. You won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic Masterpiece
Review: Upon viewing The Thin Red Line in the theater, I went and rented this older film. It turns out that it is a magical and heartfelt tale, much different than the story of the recent film.
Rating:
Summary: A lesson for directors
Review: Watch this outdated, macho, adolescent film and then watch Malick's 1998 remake. Watch how the exact same dialogue in the exact same scenes come out corny and inflected here and then watch the sublime subtlety of the new version. Dullea and Warden are wonderful, but overall this is just melodramatic pap.
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