“San Pietro” is an Army Pictorial Service filming of the Allied attempts, late in 1943, to take the town of San Pietro at the head of the Liri Valley in Italy. It is only thirty minutes long and its coverage is sketchy; but it is an absolutely unromantic, depressing account of war, and each of its shots seems to me to create deep and intense emotions. The scenes of the valley are awesome; those of the battle are confused, terrifying, surprising and tragic; and the ending, in which soldiers and villagers cautiously work their way into the town, is one of the most eloquent I have seen. The view of battle is always that of the soldier; the image, taken from flat positions on the ground or on the run, is constantly jumping and cringing from enemy fire, and is always of a small confused area of the struggle. Also the various elements of the battle—the noise, the danger, the task—are shown in the way they affect the soldiers. You are made very aware of the rough mountain terrain and the weather at particular moments, but always in terms of what difficulty the soldiers have in getting over the ground, or of hiding in it or finding the enemy in it. An insistent note is that of the loss of life and of the terrible arduousness of the task, which interacts with the realization that these four or five hills being fought for are backed up by miles of other hills. The treatment of soldiers and villagers in close-ups is warm, loving, adroit in finding the individual eloquence and in getting the most in natural action from a person who knows he is being photographed.
Major John Huston supervised the filming, wrote the commentary, which is used at great length and very well to make the movie more intense, and delivers it himself in a carefully enunciated, unrelenting manner. He uses the medium with a good deal of sureness, and with a skill (similar to Capra’s in his Signal Corps films) for molding fairly disconnected material into events that are very dramatic and have a beginning, a middle and an end. He has made San Pietro a melancholy, confused, tragic episode, and has conveyed a greater sense of individual suffering—which is not so much heroism as infinite endurance and dignity—than any other Hollywood director who has made war documentaries. Some of the scenes are edged subtly, and perhaps in some cases unintentionally, with irony: for instance the commentary on the strategy of the battle and its progress is as coherent, all-seeing and military as the movie’s view of the battle is chaotic and limited to what the soldier sees. There is a foreword in which General Mark Clark explains the importance of the Liri Valley: the shot of him is strong and unsentimentalized, taken from below and to the side, continually suggesting the decisive, unwavering military man. The introductory glimpses of the Liri Valley show it after it has been thoroughly ravaged by the battle while the commentary describes it as it is in normal times, fertile and beautiful. A typical description is that of the bombed-out chancel of a San Pietro church: “. . . note interesting treatment on chancel.” My only reservations are the director’s evident satisfaction at having more commentary than movie, his use of a number of sequences that have been shot the same way in quite a few documentaries, and the music in the final sequence.
This last episode, which shows the villagers slowly following the soldiers into the town, clearing away debris, being hurt by a last exploding mine, beginning to rebuild their houses, is a beautifully phrased, selected and photographed passage in which every scene is toned with sadness, perseverance and dignity. This section is dominantly made up of views of the town’s children and the various expressions of innocence, shyness and hopefulness they assume while watching the cameraman, expressions overlying the somber and still secret knowledge of what they have been living through during the battle for their village. They are shown moving gently and skillfully, like so many bugs, through the wrecked streets, managing somehow to give this part of the movie a mood of benevolence and joy. The sequence is one of the finest in this war’s films, though its ending, which shows a pretty farm land, well fed cows and has a commentary full of conventionally idealistic statements of what the war was about, seems to me out of keeping with the depressing, unromanticized picture that has preceded it.
July 30, 1945