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Wonderful Movie

Absolutely Fantastic

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Not since All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) has the infantry got so down and dirty. If the men of Company C aren't eating dirt, they're getting soaked by God's own rain, or shelled from the heights of Monte Casino. I guess that's why they call combat infantry men 'grunts'. It's one heck of a dirty business as the men crawl up the Italian boot after the grudging Nazi's. I can see why they call it 'the fog of war'. No one seems to know what's going on beyond shooting at the enemy. No doubt about it, director Wellman did all he could to deglamorize anything smacking of Hollywood cosmetics. I can't help thinking GI mail got clogged with bars of soap after this movie.The treatment's one of the best from the war years. Everybody pretty much low-keys it in the emotions department, Mitchum especially. There's no theatrics, just guys trying to stay together and keep breathing. The scratchy record from home just about sums up the unspoken emotions. As good as the movie is, it's still within the limits of what could be shown during this Production Code period. In short, realism gets cut short in the blood and guts department, unlike, say, Saving Private Ryan (1998), where the gore flows freely. None of that here. Men die cleanly, but no less tragically. I'm guessing the captain's (Mitchum) death is not shown so that we're forced to hold our breath, while that long, long cadaver caravan passes by. It's a poignant end to the film, but not for the men who continue the slog up the Italian boot. Fine movie.(In passing—I guess the project was made before Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper on Ie Shima. Here, actor Meredyth certainly appears to do him justice.)

This is a beautiful movie. Its most celebrated scene is of two men in a tent, one a war correspondent, named Ernie Pyle, the other an army captain, called Walker. They are shown together commiserating about the men the latter one feels responsible for sending to their deaths. This is an idle moment, an intermission from the killing but not the squalor, composed of words, rain, mud and pregnant pauses between swigs of a shared bottle of grappa. Nothing "happens" except that the viewer is privy to a communion of souls and the spectacle of what seems like the two most believable actors (Burgess Meredith as Pyle, and Robert Mitchum as Lt. Capt. Bill Walker, respectively)to ever share screen space and time together in the same motion picture.In his famous review of it, James Agee compared the packed emotionalism of GI JOE's final lyrical outburst with the elegiac verses of Whitman's Civil War poetry and while the great author of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and "A Death In The Family" was wont to gush about certain pet favs of his (John Huston, the 'Silent Age' of Charles Chaplin, and a documentary approach to the cinema, in general, spring most immediately to mind) on this occasion, when composing the longest essay he ever devoted to a single picture, I believe Agee got it exactly right for of all the war films dealing directly with the miserable business of fighting and dying and soldiering on regardless, only THE DEER HUNTER comes remotely close to equalling its weary blend of stoical honor and boundless remorse in the face of such heartbreaking images of battle.The anecdotal design of THE STORY OF G.I. JOE (the underrated, deceptively original script is by Leopald Atlas and Guy Endure) frustrates as standard narrative mechanism but coheres poetically as a whole, as an ode to the nobility of the human spirit. It ingeniously incorporates surprisingly choice ingredients of the period: the overcast quality of Robert Capa's combat photos haunt the cinematography and give this William Wellman film an expressive look (and grace) none of his others possess; the early scenes in the African desert and a hurried-up wedding between a WAAC and enlisted man have the flavor of a series of mordant Bill Maulden cartoons. Most obviously, there are the words of Pyle himself, especially the inspiring ones culled from "The Death of Captain Waskow," spoken by Meredith on the soundtrack that conclude the movie.Wellman wraps it together with the utmost tact and unerring sensitivity (qualities not usually associated with him)- with a divine instinct that seems to derive from the beyond. This makes it the greatest of Memorial Day movies. In its stark juxtaposition of brutal inevitability (the men look out for each other like muddy boots dangling in the wind, ready to drop) and the recording of amazingly tender impulses under duress, G.I JOE is the most cathartic of fighting films. It wasn't until the Peckinpah westerns that anybody surpassed it.

Released in July of 1945 shortly before the war ended this movie follows real life war correspondent Ernie Pyle played by Burgess Meredith. For his first assignment on the front he joins up with Company C of the Army's 18th Infantry, also on its virgin mission, in the North African desert. Through some tough battles Ernie earns the respect of the men. Sometime later, after victories in Sicily and elsewhere, Ernie rejoins Company C in a camp in Italy where the men this time are happy to see him. The men of Company C are led by Lt. Bill Walker, played by Robert Mitchum. Mitchum was lent from RKO to United Artists for this William Wellman directed movie. The extras in the film were real American GIs, in the process of being transferred from the war in Europe to the Pacific. Many of them were killed in the fighting on Okinawa - the same battle in which Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper - never having seen the movie in which they appeared. On April 18, 1945, Pyle died on Ie Shima, an island off Okinawa Honto, after being hit by Japanese machine-gun fire. He was riding in a jeep with Lieutenant Colonel Joseph B. Coolidge (commanding officer of the 305th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division) and three other men. The road, which paralleled the beach two or three hundred yards inland, had been cleared of mines, and hundreds of vehicles had driven over it. As the vehicle reached a road junction, an enemy machine gun located on a coral ridge about a third of a mile away began firing at them. The men stopped their vehicle and jumped into a ditch. Pyle and Coolidge raised their heads to look around for the others; when they spotted them, Pyle smiled and asked Coolidge "Are you all right?" Those were his last words. The machine gun began shooting again, and Pyle was struck in the left temple (however, the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site in Dana, Indiana, contains a telegram from the Government to Pyle's father stating Pyle was killed by a sniper).The colonel called for a medic, but none were present. It made no difference—Pyle had been killed instantly.

The term "G.I. Joe" has become so closely associated with the image of a certain toy that it is now largely forgotten that it was originally coined to describe the ordinary American foot soldier. Likewise, it is now largely forgotten just exactly who Ernie Pyle was and what he meant to the American people and, more especially, to the ordinary soldiers about whom he wrote.My father took a photograph of Ernie Pyle in the Pacific in 1945, shortly before Pyle was killed. At the time Pyle was surrounded by a mob of admiring G.Is. You'd have thought they were in the presence of Bettie Grable or Rita Hayworth rather than a short, balding, middle aged newspaper-man. When Pyle was killed in action a few days later while accompanying the infantry, the solders erected a monument at the place where he died. On it were engraved the words, "On this spot the 77th Division lost a buddy", and they really meant it. It's inconceivable that troops today would do anything like that for one of the current crop of CNN-generation reporters.The reason isn't hard to fathom. Most war correspondents hung around the rear echelon, hobnobbing with the general staff and forwarding dispatches from headquarters, and they still do. Pyle, on the other hand, lived with and wrote about the common infantrymen who were actually fighting the war. He ate their food, drank their coffee and shared their hardships through three grueling years of war from North Africa through Sicily to the European mainland, and then later on in the Pacific, where he was killed. Pyle became the spokesman for the common soldiers, and all their families back home read his syndicated column. There simply wasn't anybody else like him then, and there hasn't been since.Small wonder that William Wellman, himself a combat veteran, thought that this movie needed to be made. The filmmaker had tremendous respect for his subject, and it shows. For example, that poignant last scene is, almost word for word and image for image, straight out of one of Pyle's most famous dispatches. It would have been interesting to learn what Pyle thought of this film. Unfortunately, however, by the time it was released the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter was already dead.