Law & Honor

Guy Hamilton’s Man in the Middle

The great director Billy Wilder once said that he made movies because he wanted to tell stories. He did not say he made them because he wanted to change the world, or anything at all that would have reduced his work to political propaganda. And to tell compelling stories, rather than to engage in a Soviet-style march into the supposed world to come, you have to be interested in human beings such as they are, and not as your political vision would have them be. And you have to envision them in difficult situations, ones that will almost never admit of any political solution.

Hollywood, to be sure, had its leanings even during the golden age (1935–1965), but these were usually kept strictly subordinate to the telling of stories, and in any case, they were neither predictable nor simplistic, for otherwise how could the arch-­conservative John Wayne have made so many films for the liberal John Ford? The answer, in part, was that Wayne and Ford did agree on most of the important things in a man’s life, such as courage, honor, diligence, and love of country. Of those four, honor is probably the hardest for people now to understand. A businessman who is aiming only to make money, or a college professor who writes only for publication and promotion, or a researcher who has in mind only the advocacy of some social policy is without honor.

Murder in the Camp

The hero in Guy Hamilton’s film Man in the Middle (1964) is no saint, but in this world, we have mainly to do with the ordinary run of human sinners; what we require for most situations is not sanctity but honor. And the situation in this film is quite thankless.

We are at an Allied camp in India during World War II. Lieutenant Colonel Barney Adams (Robert Mitchum) is called in—flown in, rather, deliberately and cannily chosen—to put up a defense for one Lieutenant Winston (Keenan Wynn), who has shot a British officer dead in front of many witnesses. We are in no doubt about this fact. The film begins with the shooting. Winston goes into the man’s quarters, where he is resting and minding his business, and empties his gun into the man’s body. There was no fight.

The British and the Americans, we are told, have been getting along badly, so that what’s needed is both a guilty verdict and a summary execution (to mollify the British), as well as a real defense (to mollify the Americans). That is what Adams’s friend and superior officer, General Kempton (Barry Sullivan), has in mind for him to do.

There is a problem, though. It isn’t that Winston is sorry for what he has done. He would do it again, in a heartbeat. It isn’t that Winston was defending himself. He was not. It is that Winston is not sane.

You have quite a bar to clear in establishing insanity. We aren’t talking about depression or stress or crazy ideas. We are talking about a psychosis so terrible that one no longer has the capacity to recognize reality itself, let alone to distinguish right from wrong. And Winston appears to be sane. The conclusions from the American medical staff affirm it. He doesn’t want to be defended. He doesn’t help Adams out. He is glad he did what he did, and he is ready to die.

Human Complications

Yet Major Kaufman (Sam Wanamaker), the one doctor on the American staff who is a qualified psychiatrist, sent in a report to the contrary. But he has been summarily transferred to the interior—gotten out of the way. Fortunately, his secretary (France Nuyen, the lovely French-Vietnamese actress) made a carbon copy of the report and gives it to Adams. At first, he will not read it. It cannot be verified. It is inadmissible as evidence. He must play by the book. But when he finds out about Kaufman’s transfer, his suspicions grow, and while time is running out, he makes his way into the hinterlands to meet with Kaufman and, if Winston is indeed insane, to have Kaufman return at once to the main camp to testify. Meanwhile, Adams makes the acquaintance of Major Kensington (Trevor Howard), a British doctor who knows all about Winston and his case, but who has been told by his superiors to keep his mouth shut.

To make matters all the more painful, Winston is a thoroughly detestable human being. He hates blacks, he hates the Indians, he hates the British; and he admits—or rather he boasts—that he killed the British officer because the man was consorting with one of the local women—one of “those,” you see.

Adams is not motivated by any affection for the murderer. He is not motivated by any political vision. He is not on any crusade. But the more it appears that he has been brought in for a complicated little puppet show, the more unwilling he is to play along. Likewise, the secretary has no motives other than loyalty to her former boss, Kaufman, and though she and Adams fall into a kind of wartime love, that in itself plays no part in what the defense counsel feels he must do. The irony in this is that a woman who is not lily white, either in complexion or in behavior, is committed to defending Winston the racist, a man who would surely never defend her, and that the defense counsel, in his wartime tryst, is doing something like what Winston says the British officer did which moved him to kill the man in cold blood.

Honor over Utility

The motive force is honor. General Kempton has a war to win, and the details of Winston’s condition mean nothing to him; it appears that the bonds of friendship between him and Adams must be severed. Others on the American staff have their careers to think of. Major Kensington, who will play the key role in the story (and it could go to no one better than Trevor Howard), has no desire to save the life of a man who has killed one of his countrymen, but he, too, though jaded by the war and put upon by his superiors, is a man of honor.

The final scene, which I won’t give away, is both inevitable and a shock—nor will there be any career “redemption” for Barney Adams the honorable lawyer, nor any sentimental ringing of marriage bells in the distance. He has been a man so placed that he must lose if he is to win. But you cannot be a man of honor unless you are willing to take any loss rather than tell a lie, or bury a truth, or shrug and say that the responsibility really rests with somebody else, as if you would be glad to uphold honor on condition that everybody else in the world does the same.

Here too is a proof that what Jesus says is no mere promise, but is the very truth, a truth enacted in the deed itself, that he who would save his life must lose it.