Note: The release will be an Ignite Exclusive until December 10, ’24.
Ignite Films is the home video label that a couple of years ago brought us a 4K restoration of Invaders from Mars. The company has applied the same level of care to a WW2 classic, one of few combat-related films made during the war that transcended the nation’s morale-building needs. Hollywood had answered the War Department’s call to support the war effort, with entertainment that raised spirits ( Desperate Journey) and some that stirred vengeful resolve ( Wake Island, Air Force). None adhered strictly to the reality of events … the true story of Wake Island would have been too depressing. But as the war wound down and victory seemed inevitable, a few filmmakers got the chance to make movies that even fighting soldiers would endorse as accurate.
Released in May 1945 was John Huston’s (The Battle of) San Pietro, a semi-documentary accepted as 100% real combat footage, even though many shots were clearly staged. Hollywood moviemakers noted how intent audiences became, when action on screen had a newsreel quality.
When V-E Day and V-J Day came and went, Hollywood rushed out the combat films it still had in the pipeline, convinced that the public would soon want to move away from war-themed pictures. In December came two releases that viewed the war experience in a decidedly non-jingoistic manner. Lewis Milestone’s excellent A Walk in the Sun is a low-key rumination on the infantryman, scripted through a poetic filter. John Ford’s emotionally moving They Were Expendable surprised audiences by fixating mostly on the defeats of the early months of the war.
United Artists’ The Story of G.I. Joe fell into this same pattern, but was released much earlier in the year. Producer Lester Cowan wanted a faithful rendering of the experiences of Ernie Pyle, a popular war correspondent who broke with expected protocol by actually accompanying ground troops into combat. This was a couple of wars before the concept of ’embedding’ reporters. There were neither stiff rules about the practice, nor a military command keen to control every bit of information coming from the front lines. Pyle lived in the elements alongside the foot soldiers, in all weather. Re-uniting with a fighting unit at several points in North Africa and Italy, he reported on day-to-day life in the infantry, forming close associations with individual officers and soldiers. His popular dispatches became serious reading across America. Pyle was in his ‘forties, but many of the soldiers he marched with were barely out of their teens.
The two-card on-screen title is ‘Ernie Pyle’s Story of / G.I. Joe’, not The Story of G.I. Joe, but the text on posters is what stuck. We meet Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) when he joins up with ‘C Company’ of the 18th Infantry, trucked out into the desert of North Africa. Instead of taking a press jeep back to headquarters, Pyle gets permission from Lt. Bill Walker (Robert Mitchum) to stay with the troops, unarmed. He sees the troop witness their first death, and is present for their first combat action, the disastrous Kasserine Pass defeat.
Pyle gets to know the troops personally. He isn’t a ‘daily reports’ man, but a journalist sending back longer, personal columns. When he reunites with C Comany months later on the Italian peninsula, he’s greeted as an old comrade. He finds that Walker now commands a tough outfit. The unit is eventually pinned down for weeks below the fortress of Monte Cassino. Pyle is absent for the finale of that action, but connects again with C Company, only to find that the grind of unending combat and killing never lets up. His dispatches have to include bad news, as some of the men ‘serialzed’ in his dispatches are killed.
The Story of G.I. Joe doesn’t play like a Hollywood script with highs and lows, forced climaxes, and a dramatic shape that takes time to editorialize on the nature of soldiering. The fighters fixate on present-tense issues like food and sleep. There’s plenty of idle talk about women, including some randy banter about starlet Carole Landis. But none of the grunts debate Trumbo-esque philosophy about the meaning of the war or any strategy beyond the immediate struggle.
The film’s humanity comes through several strong characters. Sargent Warnicki (Freddie Steele) is Lt. Walker’s most reliable ‘killer.’ He’s individualized with a sentimental running gag, around his attempts to find a way to play a phonograph record sent from home, with the ‘first words’ of a baby he’s never seen. ← Private Dondaro (Wally Cassell of White Heat) is an Italian-American joker who links up with Amelia, a local girl he finds in a bombed out building (Yolanda Lacca of The Chase). The somewhat sleepy-headed Pvt. Murphy (Jack Reilly) becomes the focus of a communal effort when his buddies find out that the nurse he intends to marry, ‘Red,’ happens to be in their rest area. Ernie gives the bride away at an ad-hoc wedding ceremony, even though he can barely stay awake.
Lt. Walker has been promoted more than once. He has difficulty dealing with the strain of seeing so many green replacements killed soon after arrival, despite the guidance of his old hands. The deaths that decimate the Company are not dramatic climaxes, but off-screen events that the Company can’t even stop to mourn. The issue is not ‘who will survive?’ but, ‘how do the survivors keep going?’
The combat set pieces are efficient enough, although they are purposely designed to avoid making combat ‘entertaining.’ The Kasserine Pass sequence takes place mostly in a command tent, with news coming of units retreating or being captured. Mitchum and Steele deal with snipers in a church tower, a passage that might remind some of the ‘Nazi Charles Whitman’ sequence in Tarantino’s war comic thriller. The film had access to plenty of Army equipment and personnel. It was partially filmed at the California training Camp Cooke, which later became the Vandenberg Air Force Base. The film’s most extraordinary scene shows what is likely an expert training squad using a jeep-driven anti-tank weapon. In one unbroken shot, the jeep roars to a halt and deploys the cannon to knock out an enemy pillbox. It takes just a few seconds before the crack artillerymen are firing away. ↑ The way the recoil mechanism works, we’re thinkin’ they must be shooting live ammo.
In the same year’s independent A Walk in the Sun, the filmmakers have to make do with whatever fabricated trucks, tanks, etc., they can come up with. Some of G.I. Joe’s exteriors are filmed on obvious interior sets, yet it still feels authentic. A forced-perspective ‘Monte Cassino’ intercuts well enough with authentic war footage of the mountaintop monastery being blasted to bits.
Burgess Meredith’s hair is made white to match that of the real Ernie Pyle — the newsman was 43 but looked ten years older. Meredith plays low-key throughout, making Pyle look like everybody’s friend; the exhausted and filthy 20 year-olds aged fast as well. The only time we see Pyle hobnobbing with his fellow correspondents is when word comes through that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize.
The handsome Robert Mitchum has a natural, likable way of speaking. Coming up through the Hollywood trenches of cowboy films, he had scored in small parts in very popular war movies — nobody forgets his brief but strong appearances in The Human Comedy (his debut?), Cry ‘Havoc’ and especially Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Mitchum called it luck, but he’s special in G.I. Joe, despite at least one strong emotional scene he can’t quite manage. A few months later he’d be playing opposite Katharine Hepburn, and within two years he’d be RKO’s unbeatably popular leading man.
Not as well remembered is Freddie Steele, whose dog-faced Sergeant Warnicki is the film’s toughest soldier. ↓ A noted boxer, Steele’s first film work was ‘doubling footwork’ for Errol Flynn in Gentleman Jim. He went uncredited in most of his pictures, but is a standout as a decorated Marine in Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero.
Also excellent is Wally Cassell, whose Private Dondaro initially seems to be in the movie for standard comedy relief, the kind we expect when we see actors Sid Melton or Dick Wesson. Cassell’s underplaying transcends the cliché entirely, even making the sentimental moments seem deep. Cassell had several very memorable sidekick-type roles, with John Garfield, John Wayne, Steve Cochran. His most unusual part is in the almost-great film noir City That Never Sleeps — he’s a mime who plays a ‘mechanical man’ in the window of a nightclub.
Given a plum role is Jack Reilly, as the much-envied soldier who is given a ‘honeymoon suite’ in the back of a truck. The whole thing would be pathetic if it weren’t for the big smiles in the assembled wedding party, especially nurse ‘Red,’ the bride-to-be. The touching story is that she’s Dorothy Coonan Wellman, director Wellman’s own bride of ten years. ↓ A featured Warners chorus girl for Busby Berkeley musicals, Dorothy had been unforgettable as a Depresssion-era runaway teenager in Wellman’s classic Wild Boys of the Road. She risked marriage to the notorious womanizer Wellman, but their lasting wedded life became a Hollywood legend of its own. Her appearance in G.I. Joe feels like a gift to film fans.
Considering that it was designed to give a specific message at a specific point in the war, The Story of G.I. Joe makes an enduring statement. The passing of one significant character is barely mentioned, and another ‘featured’ soldier is last seen being led off the battlefield, suffering from acute battle fatigue. Neither are afforded lachrymose sendoffs. Reflecting the reality of life in the infantry, there is no emotional grandstanding or overdone hyping of the tragedy of any particular casualty. * The one emotional climax — still subdued — helps form an ending for the picture. But there’s no glory involved, just honesty. In this ‘good war’ the closest thing to a battlefield hero ends up carted back on a mule. He’s left by the side of the road for a later detail to pick up. Only then is the narrator given a single voiceover line about a hope for future peace.
But a bigger real-life tragedy lay in store. Before proceeding to a new assignment on the Pacific front, Ernie Pyle stopped off at the Hollywood set, where photos were taken of him posing with Burgess Meredith. His only quote about the film is said to have been, “Please don’t make me look like a fool.” Pyle never saw the movie completed. He was killed in action on Okinawa on April 17. The news traveled fast, to a public that felt they knew Ernie Pyle personally. The movie premiered just two months later.
