LITTLE ROCK — Injury Slight, Please Advise is a documentary written and directed by Hot Springs’ Josh Baxter about the exploits of an American Army Air Forces fighter pilot - Charles O’ Sullivan - shot down over the jungles of New Guinea during World War II. It has been kicking around awhile; a work-in-progress version screened at the 2007 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and it premiered at the 2009 Little Rock Film Festival.
While I’ve seen dozens of worthy movies of this general stripe, where a member of what Tom Brokaw dubbed “the Greatest Generation”sits down before the cameras and recounts his war experiences for posterity, Injury Slight is far more ambitious than most, and it supplements the usual talking heads, photographs and archival footage formula with scenes shot on location in New Guinea, dramatic re-creations filmed in Honduras and convincing aerial sequences realized in a makeshift studio Baxter set up in the back of his wife’s dance studio. (Almost all the props - including various military uniforms, rifles, bamboo huts and a mock-up of a P-38 Lightning fuselage - were made by Baxter in his garage.)
It put me in mind of two very different films, Brian Patrick’s Burying the Past: The Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a 2003 documentary that also used re-creations effectively, and Werner Herzog’s 2006 feature Rescue Dawn, which starred Christian Bale as U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who was shot down over Laos in 1966. (Dengler was also thesubject of Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Baxter similarly hopes to develop a dramatic feature based on this documentary.)
On Sept. 20, 1943, O’Sullivan’s P-38 Lightning was shot down by a Japanesefighter over the jungles of New Guinea. O’Sullivan, a veteran pilot who’d attained the five confirmed “kills” needed for ace status, crash landed and spent the next month evading Japanese troops and indigenous headhunters, who welcomed him to their village before cornering and attacking him with spears. Eventually a weak, dehydrated O’Sullivan encountered a group of Australian commandos. He radioed a message back to his squadron, informing them of his whereabouts, that concluded: “Injury slight, please advise.”
After the war, O’Sullivan had a distinguished career in the Air Force (which was separated from the Army and established as a separate branch of service after World War II), and served as commander of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing at Little Rock Air Force Base in Jacksonville in the 1960s. He and his wife, Mareelee, retired to North Little Rock and were living there when Baxter first encountered him and heard his story years ago. (O’Sullivan, who turns 95 on Saturday, recently moved to Indiana after living in central Arkansas for 40 years.)
Injury Slight is a true life story of a genuine hero with the feel and production values - the cinematography by Gabe Mayhan is first rate - of a History Channel or public television program. In short, it’s a well-made, entertaining and honest-feeling work that honors its subject without fatiguing its audience.
(O’Sullivan’s son, Patrick O’Sullivan, will be in attendance and participate in a question and answer session after the 7 p.m. screening at Market Street Cinema. Many of the props - including the P-38 fuselage mock-up - used in the film and some of O’Sullivan’s World War II memorabilia are also on display at the theater.)
MovieStyle, Pages 31 on 07/30/2010