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The only thing surprising about "Saving Private Ryan" is how conventional it is. I fully expected a much more "noir" vision of WWII along the lines of Oliver Stone's "Platoon." What I saw was an updated version of such 1950s classics as "A Walk in the Sun," written by Robert Rossen, the CP'er who named names. "A Walk in the Sun," also known as "Salerno Beachhead," just about defines this genre. A group of GI's are out on a patrol and they get killed off one by one. The enemy is faceless and evil. Our soldiers, by the same token, are good boys who are just trying to get home. The reason that CP'ers were so adept at turning out this sort of patriotic pap is that they had bought into the myth of FDR's "fight for freedom." So patriotic were the CP'ers that they also backed the decision to intern Japanese-Americans. full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/private_ryan.htm NY Times, December 27, 2009 DVDs A Grown-Up War Story for a Nation Weary of War By DAVE KEHR A WALK IN THE SUN World War II was in its final stages when “A Walk in the Sun” was released in January 1945, and the film, in its honesty and ruefulness, already has the feel of a retrospective, postwar vision. The need for propaganda had passed — it was no longer necessary to convince audiences that the war was a cheerful romp, as in “This Is the Army” or “I Wanted Wings” — and certain things could now be acknowledged, like fear, panic and death. Directed by Lewis Milestone from a well-received but now forgotten novel by Harry Brown, “A Walk in the Sun” follows a few members of an Army platoon as they land on the beach in Salerno, Italy, and make their way a few miles inland, where they are to blow up a bridge and take a farmhouse held by a German machine-gun crew. The action begins in the predawn darkness and ends in the blaze of noon; in between, war happens. After the opening credits, a narrator (Burgess Meredith) introduces the main characters, who seem at first like the standard ethnic mix of a propaganda film: there’s the loquacious New Jersey Italian (Richard Conte), the wary New York Jew (George Tyne), the terse Midwestern farmer (Lloyd Bridges), the drawling Southern medical aide (Sterling Holloway). When the platoon loses its lieutenant during the landing, leadership falls first to an inexperienced sergeant (Herbert Rudley) who cracks under the pressure. (The moment he falls to the ground and starts to sob, we know we’re in a different kind of war movie.) Command passes to the quiet, self-contained Sergeant Tyne (Dana Andrews), who carries on the best he can, leading by consensus rather than authority. Fifteen years earlier Milestone had won an Oscar for directing “All Quiet on the Western Front,” an epic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s pacifist novel of World War I. “A Walk in the Sun” is smaller in scale and less insistent on its universal humanism (the Germans here are only faceless killing machines), but it’s also less bombastic, shaped by small, ambiguous experiences rather than grand moral certainties. Milestone, born Lev Milstein in 1895 in what is now Moldova, has long been a problem for critics. At its best his work is formally daring, almost to the point of slipping into avant-garde effects (like the bouncing ball close-ups of his 1931 version of “The Front Page”), and there is a dark, subversive sense of humor in films like “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” (1933) and “The General Died at Dawn” (1936). But his work could also seem blandly institutional, in prestige projects like the 1952 version of “Les Miserables” and in overproduced entertainments like the Rat Pack vehicle “Ocean’s Eleven” (1960, from a script written by Mr. Brown and Charles Lederer). One of his most consistently accomplished films, “A Walk in the Sun” walks a fine line between unassuming naturalism and high stylization, most effectively in Milestone’s handing of Brown’s concentrated, poetic dialogue (as adapted, almost word for word, by the screenwriter Robert Rossen). The use of repeated phrases (“You guys kill me,” “I’ve got the facts”), passed back and forth among the performers, gives the film a cadenced quality, a rhythm somewhere between a military march and the echoing absurdities of a Beckett play. Because “A Walk in the Sun” was never properly registered for copyright, substandard public-domain versions have been flooding the home video market for decades. This new edition from VCI Entertainment has been authorized by Brown’s estate and boasts far better image and sound than previous releases, though details are still a bit soft, and contrast is low. Nevertheless the VCI release goes a long way toward restoring this remarkable film to its proper place in film history, as a token of that brief moment between the winding down of one war and the ramping up of the next: the cold war, which would haunt American movies for the next two decades. (VCI, $14.99, not rated) Part 3 of "A Walk in the Sun" is online: http://www.guba.com/watch/3000026711 ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
