The Leatherneck is a 1929 silent film starring William Boyd, Alan Hale, and Robert Armstrong. about the adventures of three Marines together. The film start In Medias Res as three Marines are struggling through the desert of Manchuria with one of them clearly wounded. Their officer is told they needed to be officially charged with desertion, but he believes that they had a good reason for going missing. The film then goes into a Troubled Backstory Flashback as Tex, the only one of the three still fit to stand trial, tells of what happened.
The three meet just after the war in France where Fuzzy is a German POW. Tex is friendly with him and takes him drinking one day where they meet Buddy, who refuses to drink with a German. They get into a bar brawl which engulfs the whole bar and they end up having to evade the military police, becoming Fire-Forged Friends in the process.
There's a Time Skip of several years during which Fuzzy becomes an American citizen and joins the Marines as well. The three meet up in Russia where they've all been sent to deal with the Siberian intervention.
They immediately pick right back up, drinking and getting into trouble. They meet the American mercenary Captain Heckla and through him an impoverished Russian family. Heckla explains a plan where he plans to Make It Look Like an Accident will happen to the father so he can take control of his potash mine and coldly leaves what will happen to the siblings up to Tex, Fuzzy, and Buddy. They beat him up and promptly forget about him. Tex falls in love with the daughter of the family, Tanya, and marries her.
But things turn bad as Heckla riles up a bunch of revolutionists who kill Tanya's father and brother. Telling her they survived and are waiting for her outside the city, he takes her, leaving the three friends despondent over where she could have gone.
After being transferred to China, Fuzzy and Buddy see an ad for the potash mine now being controlled by Heckla. Fuzzy decides to go, telling Buddy to come after him in two weeks if he's not back. They mutually decide not to tell Tex what they're doing in case it comes to nothing, so they won't get his hopes up. When Fuzzy doesn't come back, Buddy goes after him. Now suspicious, Tex figures out what has happened, and sets out after his two friends.
He finds the potash mine in the middle of the Manchurian desert, with Heckla dead, Buddy badly wounded, and Fuzzy having been tortured into insanity. Through sheer grit, he gets the three of them back through the desert, but Buddy dies before they get back to their base.
The military trial jury considers this all to be baseless lies told to cover up Tex's desertion and the murder of one of his best friends since there's no evidence to the contrary. The only one who believes him is Tex's captain, who makes a desperate plea to Fuzzy, who is still in the throes of insanity. That's when he sees Tanya wandering around outside asking after Tex. He speaks for the first time in months, calling out to her.
She comes in and tells her side of the tale, how Heckla lured her into the desert, how she escaped while he was drunk, and became so ill she had to spend weeks in a village before recovering enough to go where she knew the Marines were stationed. With a material witness, the jury acquits Tex of murder, but finds him guilty of desertion. They sentence him to being confined to quarters...for one whole hour.
Upon finding out from Tanya that Fuzzy was the one to call out to her, they go into the outside chamber. Fuzzy is staring off into the distance again, and it appears the return of his sanity was only temporary. Then he turns around and sees Tex, shouting his name. The three friends hug joyfully as the film ends.
Tropes:
- Bar Brawl: How the three best friends meet.
- Bittersweet Ending: Tex and Tanya find each other again, Fuzzy's sanity is restored, but Buddy is dead and Fuzzy clearly has some form of PTSD now.
- Blatant Lies: Heckla tells Tanya her father and brother are waiting for her just outside the city and drags her all the way to the Manchurian desert before she figures out he's deceived her.
- Buddy reassures Tex not thirty seconds before he dies that he's okay.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Fuzzy is captured by Heckla when he goes after him, is tied to a wooden base, and given Chinese water torture for three or four weeks on end before he finally snaps and is Driven to Madness.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Buddy dies as Tex holds him on the trip back to their base.
- Dies Wide Open: Heckla dies this way.
- Despair Event Horizon: Tex watches one of his best friends die and the other one go insane, with still no idea where his wife is, or ever if she's alive or dead. He collapses from the strain of it all into his captain's arms.
- Funetik Aksent: Fuzzy has a German one represented in the title cards.
- Hope Bringer: Tanya manages to restore Fuzzy's sanity and gets Tex acquitted.
- Hope Spot: Tex manages to get the wounded Buddy and now insane Fuzzy out of the desert alive, but Buddy dies on the boat they take to get back to the Marine base.
- Idiot Ball: Despite showing to be smart otherwise, Tanya apparently willingly followed Heckla all the way from Russia right into Manchuria. While parts of China and Russia do border each other, such a journey would've taken a few days at least, meaning he somehow strung her along promising her that her family was just over the next hill for hundreds if not thousands of miles until they were out in the middle of nowhere.
- Manly Tears: Tex and Buddy weep when they realize Fuzzy is as good as dead to them after going crazy.
- Mutual Kill: Buddy shoots Heckla dead, but not before being mortally wounded himself.
- Mood Whiplash: The first half of the film is just lighthearted fun while the three friends drink and get into mischief together. The second half gets extremely dark after Tanya's father and brother are executed.
- Old Retainer: Dmitri, the family servant that tells Tanya going with Heckla is a bad idea.
- Sanity Slippage: Fuzzy loses his sanity after being tortured.
- Sanity Strengthening: But he regains it when he sees Tanya, who they've been searching for all this time, right outside his window.
- Say My Name: Two times from Fuzzy. The first when he sees Tanya on the screen and calls out her name loudly, shown by the title card in all caps: "TANYA!" The second is when he turns around and sees Tex for the first time after regaining his sanity, shouting out Tex's name.
- Shadow Discretion Shot: How they show Tanya's father and brother being executed.
- So Happy Together: Tex and Tanya are shown with a few happy scenes, particularly their wedding, that just seem to foreshadow all the trouble they're about to go through.
- True Companions: Tex, Buddy, and Fuzzy make up a trio of friends who will do anything for each other. Tanys joins as a fourth halfway through the film, as Buddy and Fuzzy are as devoted to finding her as Tex is.
