Apologia

for US imperialism and racist condescension.

By presenting the Japanese as cruelly and violently paternalistic, Back to Bataan implicitly highlights American colonial benevolence.

Senor Bello's martyrdom underscores that the good Filipino is loyal to the US and happy to accept its tutelage. While the Japanese invade the schoolhouse and kill Bello, the Americans, as represented by the kindly Miss Barnes, teach lessons in ostensible Filipino freedom.

After Bello's death, Maximo takes up the cause of anti-Japanese (but not anti-US) imperialism by serving directly under Madden's command. When Madden suggests that Maximo should get an award for accomplishing his mission, Miss Barnes snorts, noting that Maximo had misspelled "liberty" in his last composition. To US imperialists, one can't be a good soldier until one is a conscientious student of US "education" first.

Later, with his last breath, Maximo apologizes to Miss Barnes for his misspelling of liberty (i.e. misunderstanding the US role in the Philippines which was to set Filipinos free?) but Miss Barnes eulogizes him as the colonial pupil par excellence. As the music swells in the background, she declares "Dear God - who ever learned it so well!"

Once again, in Maximo's death, this movie's ideological focus on tutelage supersedes the war plot: it's less important that Maximo die as a soldier than that he, by dying, prove how well he learned the lessons of American-sponsored liberty. In Maximo, as in Senor Bello, we see that it's less important to graduate Filipinos to positions of either military or educational professionalism than to reinforce their subordination to American leadership.