THE STORY OF G.I. JOE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 392, 27 December 1946, Page 16

THE STORY OF G.I. JOE

(United Artists)

[tT never pays to generalise, even about films. Though I did leave myself a loophole by saying that there were some exceptions to the rule

that the pre-Christmas period is a dull one for new pictures, I now find it necessary to eat several of my words used in this column last week. And I do so willingly, because at least two of the pictures which came my way in the week just before Christmas were far from being lightweight and undistinguished. The Story of G.I. Joe, in particular, is an outstanding American effort. A masterly example of imaginative realism, it belongs to the genre of war films in which the British, with San Demetrio, The Way Ahead, and The Way to the Stars, have hitherto been pre-eminent. This film was directed by William Wellman, and those picturegoers lucky enough to have seen his Oxbow Incident will recognise in it the same qualities of keen observation of character, high dramatic tension, and the same understanding of the effect of environment on behaviour, whether in the individual or the group. Again, in this account of a small detachment of U.S. infantry in Tunisia and Italy, the onlooker is given the same feeling of personal involvement in the events depicted as he had in watching the lynching in The Oxbow Incident; and the effect is achieved in much the same way, by telling the story through an intermediary who, though caught up in the action, retains his de tachment as an observer. This intermediary in the present case is the late Ernie Pyle, a noted American correspondent whose reporting of the war on the Mediterranean front won him a Pulitzer prize, and who was later killed on Okinawa. * % * 4 HE film, in fact, is ostensibly the story of Ernie Pyle himself; but it is much more the story of Company C, of the 18th U.S. Infantry, the group to which Pyle attached himself at the beginning in North Africa and to which he became so attached as he followed their fortunes through Sicily, up the long hard road to Rome, and into the inferno of Cassino. Pyle (as memorably played by Burgess Meredith) is in the film, as he was in real life, merely the modest, honest chronicler, never obtruding himself between the camera and the actors-some of them Hollywood professionals, some actual combat veterans, but all first-class artists-who portray the soldiers, those soldiers about whom Pyle once used these words: "No one knows what it’s like... . Up in the sky they die well-fed and clean-shaven. But the infantryman-he lives miserable, he dies miserable." * % * IN presenting the misery in life and death of the common G.I., whose story is essentially that of almost any footslogger in almost any army, the film never flinches. It is as unsparing- in its realism as any straight-out documentary or newsreel. Unemotional, unsentimental, making its best points by irony and

under-statement, it shows the face of war without one .wave of a flag, one note of false heroics or jingoism, without a single trace of glamour; shows it as it is known to the great mass of those who take part in it but as it has seldom been shown before on the screen-as a dirty, wretched affair of rain, mud, heat, cold, hunger, weary marches, boredom, frustration, and fear. The raw recruits who look on death for the first time in Tunisia become hardened, bitter, fighting men as the campaign advances; each time the correspondent catches up with Company C he notices the gaps in the ranks of those he knew, gaps that have been filled again by raw recruits who in turn becomes tough, grim, unshaven fighters. Almost the only decency in life left to them to experience is their developing comradeship. And so it goes on, up to and finally past Cassino where the infantry have been held up so _ long, crouching in the mud under fire from the monastery heights. * * * OMETIMES, as when they drop wearily to rest.in a shattered Italian "town, the men of Company C have the grey anonymity of the stones against which they lean. But we get to know them also as individuals-the Captain, a tough sertimentalist who holds his men together and wins their affection, and whose death in battle ends the story; the Sergeant whose sole desire, apart from killing Germans, is to find a phonograph on which to be able to hear the record of his child’s voice that has been sent to him, and who goes mad when he does hear it; Private Dondaro, obsessed by thoughts of women; and several others, all sharing the same discomforts but too tired and too familiar with one another’s company to bother any longer to share ideas, Each man is shut up inside himself, thoughts have become fixations and conversation is an effort. ; In fact, some of the sequences of G.I. Joe, with the men stagnating in the slush under Cassino, remind one strongly of Journey’s End. But often there is swift, crashing, purely cinematic action; and one incident, when two of the U.S. infantry play a merciless game of hide-and-seek with a brace of German shipers among the ruins of an Italian church, is likely, I think, to become one of the classic sequences of the screen because of-its terrific tension and its superb attention to detail. The Story of G.I. Joe is a piece of brilliant reporting by a man who was a master of his craft (Ernie Pyle supervised the production and guaranteed its authenticity). But it is, of course, very much more than just a stark record of events. Taking his cue from Pyle, the director has given the film a point of view, so that one watches it not merely with absorbed interest, but also with pity and anguish, and above all with admiration and wonder at the capacity for endurance of the common soldier.