War What Was It Good For ?

A problem that would be recurrent for American war films was their impact on the British public, who would periodically complain of both their content and quality. The film that faced the most adversity was Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma! (1945), for it was this film that several reviewers would later describe it as Errol Flynn capturing Burma, single-handed.

The three American war masterpieces in the year 1945 garnered hardly any attention at all in the British isles. These were the heady days of triumph and victory and the British were ready to move onward and upward from the war thematic, particularly in films which adopted such a grim and melancholy view of the fighting man. John Ford's debut war feature, They Were Expendable (1945), dealt with the pained exploits of Commander John D. Bulkeley (Brickley in the film) small squadron of PT boats in the Philippine withdrawal, coupled with implied criticism of the pre-war military leadership.

                Hey Joe Where was that gun in your hand going?

Perhaps the two greatest depictions of the American infantry-man were The Story of GI Joe and A Walk in The Sun, which was directed by William Wellman, would be praised the universe over, but little seen. A hymn of praise to the American soldiers who battled their way from North Africa to Rome, by way of Sicily, southern Italy and Cassino, the film was inspired by the writings of war correspondent Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) who would later be killed at Iwo Jima. There were certainly no mock heroics, only the hunger, the fear, the misery , weariness and ennui of the foot soldiers who were amidst a chaotic nightmare of military maneuvers. The film also had the cojones to show the bodies of dead infantrymen in a low-key sendoff, which was at odds with the euphoria at the time and would account for the wariness with which it was received.

                       Sun, sun sun here it comes

For A Walk in the Sun, which was directed by the prolific Lewis Milestone, scriptwriter Robert Rossen took the screenplay in near verbatim fashion from Harry Brown's original novel and conveyed unexpurgated the book's verbal cadences on which bordered on a folkloric style. The film portrays the confused progress of a single platoon during one morning between landing at Salerno and taking an objective six miles away. This was the ultimate refinement of the group motif, achieved by careful and acute observations of individual characteristics and states of mind, from the frenetic collapse of a shell-shocked sergeant (Herbert Rudley) to the habit of another soldier (John Ireland) of composing letters home in his head as a paradoxical commentary on the action.

                       Stanley Kubrick's anti-war war film Path of Glory (1957)

Thus the American combat film attained maturity and excellence at the very moment that the genre had suddenly become unfashionable, and the masterpieces of the war remained unsung until a later time of rediscovery and reappraisal.