A Walk in the Sun
Directed by Lewis Milestone
Written by Harry Brown and Robert Rossen
1945/USA
Lewis Milestone Productions
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
[box] Rivera: It could’ve been something else. It could’ve been the engineers or the tanks. It could even have been the Navy. They looked at me and said, “Here’s a guy that can walk.” They finished me, all right.
Friedman: Everybody walks. Even monkeys.[/box]
Lewis Milestone brought this rather stylized combat film as close to an anti-war picture as he could have given its year.
A platoon of American GIs lands on the beach at Salerno. Before it gets a chance to do so, its lieutenant is killed. The senior NCO soon follows, leaving some rather green sergeants (Dana Andrews, Lloyd Bridges, Herbert Rudley) to pick up the slack. After fighting their way up the beachhead, the men learn that their mission is to take a farmhouse about six miles inland and to blow up a nearby bridge.
We are privy to all the grousing and fatalistic banter of the enlisted men as they tortuously make progress toward their destination. When the platoon arrives, it is already short of ammunition and inspiration but determined to carry on. With Richard Conte in a fantastic performance as a smart-ass cigarette-cadging machine gunner, and John Ireland, Sterling Holloway, Norman Lloyd, and Huntz Hall among the other grunts.
The dialogue in this one is quite literary and rhythmic, yet somehow very effective in conveying the interior monologues of the men. We get the phrases “nobody dies” and “you kill me” over and over like a kind of Greek chorus. And the performances are all right on. Even though it is so stagey, one gets the feeling that this is the essence of what combat was like – ordinary guys just trying to do their job by the seat of their pants and somehow come out of it alive. Recommended.
Trailer
