Once in life, a second time in death, Pfc. Ira Hayes — World War II veteran, Iwo Jima flag-raiser, Pima Indian — ran head-on into the homefront propaganda machine.
He wasn’t the first, but director Clint Eastwood made a movie about it in 2006: “Flags of Our Fathers” is based on a book about the six U.S. Marines who raised an American flag atop Mount Suribachi in 1945.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal caught the moment, and the photo became a poster (and later a stamp, and a massive bronze sculpture). The poster was the crucial marketing image of the war’s most successful bond drive, worth $26 billion.
Like “The Outsider,” director Delbert Mann’s 1961 Hayes biopic starring Tony Curtis in redface makeup and a temporary nose, “Flags of Our Fathers” took the nervy commercial risk of telling at least some of Hayes’ real, painful story. At its pungent, melancholy best, the film transcends its own casting.
In real life and the movie, Hayes and the other two surviving Marines who raised that flag returned home, on orders from the top, to tour the country as American heroes urging their fellow citizens to buy bonds. It worked. The campaign, some say, sealed the Allied victory in the South Pacific.
It also helped ruin Hayes, who had no taste for show business or being part of what he felt was a trumped-up victory lap. He hated being treated as an American idol, it didn’t square with his sense of being a pretender to heroism. His cold, lonely death at 32 was brought on by alcohol and probable post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Arizona-born Hayes, played by Adam Beach in Eastwood’s film, may not be the center of the narrative. But he’s the one you remember, years later, from a flawed and overcrowded panorama of fascinating ambiguities.
Eastwood’s film — which he took on after Steven Spielberg and various writers couldn’t figure out how to compress the 2000 book of the same title by James Bradley and Ron Powers into a satisfying two-hour story — has been on my mind ever since Hayes got lost in another propaganda effort recently.
In case you missed it, when President Donald Trump’s administration embarked on its government-wide purge of website materials containing anything deemed DEI-related content, the Defense Department removed website pages featuring historical context and specific achievements made by people of color and women and LGBTQ Americans, wartime or otherwise.
Out went hundreds of pages dealing with Jackie Robinson, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo code talkers and, among many others, Hayes.
What happened to Hayes’ reputation in that purge? Anything? Nothing? To me, it felt like something. Erasing a digital page of detail about a person’s life, and the context of that life, means something. Amid widespread protests, many of those pages were restored last week.
Eastwood made “Flags of Our Fathers” as part of a hugely ambitious two-film project. The second part of that project, “Letters from Iwo Jima,” told from the Japanese point of view, came out shortly after “Flags.” “Letters” is the superior work, far sleeker in its story design. It benefits from what “Flags” never could: a single protagonist, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi as played by Ken Watanabe, as opposed to an ensemble. Together, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima dramas get at something elusive and important about who we are, and how and why we fight. And how honor and sacrifice can be used for myth creation.
Now 94, Eastwood is the most paradoxical filmmaking legend alive. He made his superstardom with the character known as the Man With No Name and Sergio Leone Westerns of hyperbolic size and operatic, slightly insane grandeur. And lots of killing. Then came “Dirty Harry” and more killing.
I remember seeing the trailer for “Flags of Our Fathers” nearly 20 years ago, thinking that the movie seemed unusually audience-unfriendly for Eastwood. To its credit, given how often trailers lie about the movies they’re selling, even the trailer made it look tough-minded in its exploration of the young Marines caught up in a wartime bond drive full of fireworks and the gung-ho spirit, indebted to Rosenthal’s indelible photograph. The photo Hayes later said he wished had never been taken.
But an image like that photo, with its simple, unerring blast of patriotism, reassures us — even if we can hear the faint hum of whatever propaganda machine may be gearing up behind it.
Of all movie stars, Eastwood may have gone the furthest with modern fairy tales, buying wholeheartedly and bloodily into the very thing Harve Presnell’s character, a Marine Corps colonel, refers to, skeptically, in “Flags of Our Fathers.” He says this: “We like things nice and simple. Good and evil, heroes and villains. There are always plenty of those. Most of the time they are not who we think they are.”
Something in Eastwood’s finest work shares not a statement but a feeling of how myths can be made and broken within one story. It happens out West, in the masterwork “Unforgiven” (1992); in the eccentric, dicey surrogate father/son lament of “A Perfect World” (1993); in the stealth emotional force of “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995); in the Iwo Jima films; and in Eastwood’s most recent and humblest success, “Juror #2,” a 2024 courtroom drama refusing to provide an easy rooting interest.
If that list leaves off Eastwood’s biggest hits, “Million Dollar Baby” and “American Sniper,” well, it’s a free country, and I can dislike those films for reasons that make me appreciate other Eastwood movies all the more.
Hollywood has a way with erasure, ignoring or rewriting parts and people who tell different sides of our history. Ira Hayes played himself, for a few seconds, in the 1949 “Sands of Iwo Jima,” the balderdashed John Wayne version of events. Hayes’ fleeting seconds of rent-a-celebrity in that context felt like an erasure of his true self.
Eastwood, I think, shares Hayes’ resistance to manufactured patriotism and the propaganda machine. I doubt he’d have made “Flags of Our Fathers” if he didn’t have feelings about it — and didn’t see Hayes as someone whose story deserved more than cursory treatment in the larger American story.
“Flags of Our Fathers” is widely available for streaming. “The Outsider” is available on YouTube.
