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Quantico, Va. — Five Marines in camouflage fatigues formally put the flag of "Flags of Our Fathers" on display Friday, a week before the opening of the movie that tells the story behind this tattered banner of red, white and blue wool.

"This flag symbolizes the Marine Corps' past, present and future," said Bob Sullivan, curator of the new National Museum of the Marine Corps. "The design of this building was based on the raising of this flag."

RICK McKAY/Staff (ENLARGE)
The U.S. flag that was raised atop Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima in World War II is covered with glass during an installation ceremony Friday at the new National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Va. A star from a fighter plane suspended overhead is reflected in the glass.
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Indeed, the gleaming architecture that juts abruptly above the tree line next to I-95 evokes the famous photograph of six Americans raising this flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.

The picture taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal is the most famous and most reproduced battle photo in history, Sullivan said. It also inspired the Marines' Iwo Jima Memorial just across the Potomac River from the nation's capital.

The movie "Flags of Our Fathers," directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg, is based on the 2000 book of the same name co-written by James Bradley and Ron Powers. Bradley is the son of John Bradley, a Navy corpsman who was one of the men pictured raising the flag on Iwo Jima.

John Wayne held the flag in publicity photos for the 1949 movie "The Sands of Iwo Jima," but the flag itself did not fly in the film.

For most of the decades since, it has been kept in a sealed display case in Building 58 at the Washington Navy Yard.