“Story of GI Joe” is a long, hard, relentless fiction film based on Ernie Pyle’s reports of the fighting in North Africa and Italy. Its aim is to show life in the infantry with all the integrity it can—the physical discomfort, the stupor induced by the killing and wounding, the hopelessness, and the malevolence against the conditions of a life that keeps the infantryman constantly humiliated and wretched. It is firmer about its feeling and its concept than any other Hollywood movie has been about anything in years. It has assimilated the whole lesson of the war documentary, which has shown the advantages of truth and some of the techniques for making the truth eloquent in a movie; and as a consequence it differs vitally from any recent Hollywood movie. It is very intelligent about the kind of working-class Americans it deals with. Its director, William Wellman (“Public Enemy,” “Wild Boys of the Road,” “Oxbow Incident”) is very able at getting this American’s surface hardness, withdrawal, pride, harshness and independence; and he is especially good when he has a group of men in close contact and speech.
The writing, as well as the direction, constantly shuns the romanticisms that have colored almost every other war film. Nobody talks about the war, either as an aim, or as a matter of beating an enemy; in general they seem too tired to talk, and when they do (about rain, mud, work, sex, discomfort) it is in shorthand, avoiding the obvious, which includes every great question like the danger of death and the separation from everybody they love. The men cast as these soldiers (Robert Mitchum, Freddie Steele and Wally Cassell have the principal roles as Captain, Sergeant and Italian-American private) look literally tough enough to have got through the war and don’t look anything like actors. Instead of entertaining you with heroic battle action, the script skips most of the battles in order to show the effects on the men of the stupefying exhaustion, of the death of friends, of the growing hopelessness of surviving the next battle, of the maddening consciousness that nothing they personally endure in battle is going to help their personal situation. One important scene of fighting is shown—that in which two Americans adroitly maneuver a victory from two Nazis in a church—and it is so managed that killing is made a hard, real physical fact, and killing in a church made to hold the entire question of war.
The movie has no plot in the sense of a novel or play or the usual movie, but produces an effect like that of a string of newspaper reports on the career of one company of soldiers during the time they were accompanied by Ernie Pyle (who is played by Burgess Meredith). It is the only Hollywood biography I know that presents the hero in a believable relationship to the events and the other characters. Pyle appears as little as possible, and is shown as a self-effacing unparticipating observer, who talks like the soldiers and as little as they do. Besides his humility the movie manages to convey beautifully his iron-cast refusal to trespass on other lives and especially on the tragic parts of those lives; it also conveys some of Pyle’s horror of war (most eloquently expressed in his hostile, exploding manner of typing), and starts to express his fatalism but unfortunately doesn’t drive it home. The most moving part of Meredith’s acting is his projection of the slight, narrow movements of a frail man who seems by temperament utterly unsuited to infantry life—this is done best during a muddy march when Pyle is shown helplessly sitting in a pool of water, conscious of his own weakness and with his fastidiousness overwhelmed. Meredith on the whole seems to me too cuddly and puppyish, the photography makes him look too cute and toylike, and there is a synthetic note in every word of his slow drawl. Freddie Steele’s acting seems to me as good as it could possibly be; I liked the casting and acting of Robert Mitchum and of Dorothy Coonan as a nurse; the characterization of the Italian-American is inspired on all counts, including Wellman’s and Cassell’s.
“GI Joe” is actually a story-film version of “San Pietro,” which was a deeper and more moving film. The first third of “GI Joe” is contrived and synthetic and not very well done, and only in the stretch showing the first activity in a just-conquered village does it achieve the breathtaking reality, fullness of detail and sharp effect from shot to shot that all of “San Pietro” has.
But whatever it lacks in grandeur, depth and tragedy and formal beauty, Wellman’s is one of the only movies in years that says just about all it has to say, and drives it home with real cinematic strength.
August 13, 1945