LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies Ernie Pyle's Story of G. I. Joe—People can look at this picture now without the sickening realization that the GI Joes still have a lot more of it to go through. Seeing it is as...
...These boys are not effusive either...
...The other:, in their lesser parts, are just as good...
...Gen...
...There is no glamor or theatricality about it—just straight, discerning, and sympathetic reporting of the American foot-soldier's life on the fighting front...
...A picture to fill one with humility, and long, long thoughts...
...Perhaps even more of a tribute to it comes from a report of a showing to returned overseas men in a Southern camp: "Leaving the theater, they said nothing...
...The picture has a dramatic sweep toward victory, symbolic of the whole war...
...It may haye been a shock, and a cause for thought, to see virtually themselves on the screen...
...There is no one in all its large cast who doesn't seem exactly rights—an actual human figure illumined by understanding and a gift for focussing on the significant...
...Pyle and Company C had their first battle experience together in North Africa—green men and a green war-reporter setting eyes for the first time on the blood and death of meeting with the enemy...
...You are familiar enough with Mauldin's Uncle Willie to perhaps realize that he is not the kind of character to go around being effusive about a movie...
...They just con-tinued out and down the walk to the barracks, their heads bowed...
...Always after that Pyle felt that this company was peculiarly his own, and whenever he could, in the wanderings of his profession, he rejoined them as if coming back to old friends and comrades in arms...
...But Uncle Willie does have a nice solemn respect for the truth, and the entire audience of returned veterans was solemnly, silently, approving...
...Burgess Meredith, with the most casual and artless artfulness, creates an embodiment of Pyle that must have been one of the most delicate acting jobs a player ever tackled...
...Ernie Pyle himself would surely have found satisfaction in the way William Wellman had put him and his book on the screen...
...Eisenhower has called it the greatest war picture he's ever seen...
...The fighting parts are exciting, but most memorable are the lulls between, when Pyle got his glimpses of this man and that revealing an inner self looking back into the far-away past, or forward into the possible future...
...He saw the warmer, inextinguishably good-natured side of men that cements their comradeship in the grim business of fighting, and that is one of the things that comes across most movingly in the film...
...HE saw them develop from a raw outfit into a skillful fighting machine, always the "little guy" in the back-, ground but always unobtrusively close to the men in their personal reactions to mud, weariness, loneliness, and death...
...Seeing it is as near actual experience as the movies, even the best of the documentaries, have managed to provide for the home folks who can only imagine war from what they have read and heard...
...Robert Mitchum, emerging from modest Western roles, makes a captain in whom the Army can find an example of the best it could wish for in an officer and a man...
...Family...
...With them he went to Sicily, then on to Italy and the long hold-up at Mount Cassino, finally on to the road to Rome...
...It is symbolic too of countless individual lives that ended or survived...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 36
