## *The Red Badge of Courage*: The Exception
The most critically discussed film of Murphy’s career was not a Western and was not a commercial success. *The Red Badge of Courage*, directed by John Huston and released in 1951, was an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Civil War novel about a Union soldier’s experience of fear and cowardice and eventual redemption.
The film was a prestige production by MGM, not Universal-International, and Murphy’s casting in it was a departure from his standard commercial work. John Huston was one of the most respected directors in Hollywood, known for *The Maltese Falcon* (1941) and *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre* (1948). The project was ambitious and was complicated by studio interference that substantially cut the film’s running time before release.
Murphy played Henry Fleming, the novel’s protagonist — a young Union soldier who flees from his first battle and must reconcile that act of cowardice with his identity and his desire to serve. The specific irony of casting the most decorated American combat veteran in the role of a fictional coward was not lost on critics or audiences, and accounts of the production note that Murphy was aware of it. Whether the awareness helped or hindered his performance is a matter of critical judgment that the sources consulted here do not resolve definitively.
The film was not a commercial success. The studio’s cuts reduced the kind of coherent narrative that Crane’s novel had provided. Lillian Ross’s behind-the-scenes account of the production, published in *The New Yorker* in 1952 and later expanded into a book called *Picture*, documented the collision between Huston’s artistic ambitions and MGM’s commercial instincts that produced the final film.