Watch A Walk in the Sun For Free

Great Film overall

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A Walk in the Sun lacks intensity of Lewis Milestone's masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. In fact there is too much jaw jaw as the platoon soldiers chat among each other while walking.A platoon lands in Italy with the object to take a Nazi held farmhouse, their lieutenant is injured and it is up to the platoon's sergeants to lead them further and achieve their aims.This is an unsentimental look at the life of the infantrymen, we get to learn about their background and what makes them tick. The trouble is it's all a bit dull. The film has a solid cast but I felt they could had done with more snappier and profound dialogue.

Despite the Milestone pedigree, the movie doesn't wear well. Except for a couple of touchingly unusual scenes, the war story plays more like a series of WWII clichés. The real problem is that the narrative never really conveys the emotional trauma of war. Yes, men we like are killed, but we're not made to feel the loss. Instead the deaths never make the emotional jump from screenplay to gut-level. In fact, the whole movie seems oddly detached from the horrors of war—it's like Milestone doesn't really engage with the material, filming instead in an impersonal manner (Contrast with the intensity of All Quiet on the Western Front {1930}).However, giving the ordinarily clownish Sterling Holloway (McWilliams) a straight role as the ill-fated medic proved a daring stroke of inspiration. The medic's brave little act when contrasted with Holloway's usual movie role, gives his death an added dimension. Also, Sergeant Porter's (Rudley) combat breakdown adds a thoughtfully realistic note as we find out that not all war wounds are physical. However, whoever decided wisecracking Romano (Conte) should wisecrack in every other line of dialog ruined the whole idea. The constant badinage does get tiresome, almost mocking the whole idea of serious combat. As most WWII movies knew, a little of that cocky behavior goes a long way in life or death situations.Anyway, the movie now looks to me like just another war programmer from the period, minus the many fine qualities one might expect from its pedigree.(In passing, note that not a single female appears anywhere during the two hour runtime.)

If IMDb is to be believed this movie was released in December, 1945, some seven or eight months after the War In Europe ended so that in one way any anti-war message built into it was superfluous. Director Lewis Milestone who was, in fact, a fine all-rounder with a long career, will always be closely associated with All Quiet On The Western Front which dealt with the futility of war albeit World War One so it was perhaps natural that he repeat the lesson with World War Two. This movie is notable for its matter of fact acceptance of war as a natural recurring phenomena and one that makes little or no attempt to either glamorize war or paint a horrific picture of it. The main thrust is the six-mile trek by one platoon from a beachhead in Salerno inland to the farmhouse that they have been assigned to take and hold. En route we meet and get to know the typical Hollywood 'bomber crew' cross section of personnel with very little actual combat until the last couple of reels when they do, in fact, attain their objective. Certainly worth a look.

A Walk in the Sun (1945)The first third of this film is amazing. It' remarkably disturbing and dark, about a bunch of soldiers landing at night in Italy, World War II. The sun does eventually rise, but it's an eerie and claustrophobic and surprisingly gentle twenty minutes. The cast is really perfect, without any overly macho guys, just some ordinary men with feelings, feelings for life, for each other little by little, and for a kind of fatalistic fear that turns into acceptance at times, until events force them into action.Once toward halfway, the movie becomes a more conventional, a large rambling group of foot soldiers a bit lost as to what to do as they walk along, in the sun, in Italy. They talk without a lot of open fear, including a bit of chitchat even as they confront enemies of one kind or another. There is an air of ordinary resignation through it all, as if the movie makers knew the audience could only handle a kid gloves kind of truth about the war, which was still raging when it was released. Even though there is an inevitable sense that the Americans were winning (they were landing in Italy, not being pushed off to sea), there is also the sense that these really nice guys might die, suddenly, because of events beyond their control.By the final third a military objective clarifies, a small one, but a potentially deadly one. When it plays out, it's more about war, and winning. The enemy is never shown, and the brutality is limited to the last two minutes, but it's a devastating two minutes, and probably too difficult for audiences to watch at the time while the war was going on. Though filming was finished in January 1945, the film wasn't released officially until December, with six months of peace already healing some of the wounds, and didn't see wide release until the following year, long after war films had stopped being made. Director Milestone did get Army approval for the film in 1945, and it does seem accurate in its awfulness, even now. It's right before the climax that the film returns to it extraordinary, inner conscience, following Dana Andrews crawling though the weeds to the farmhouse they intend to overtake. How long would it take to crawl around the world? A hundred years? A thousand years?For the best this film has, it's essential, a major piece of war filmmaking.