The Story of G.I. Joe

I'm ending my mini-Robert Mitchum festival with his big break: The Story of G.I. Joe. Directed by William Wellman, it earned Mitchum is only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor, as the tough but caring Captain Walker.

It was released in April 1945, and it amazes me that so many World War II films were made before it was over. We watch them now with a sense of satisfaction that we beat the Huns, but it must have been tense to make and then for audiences to watch a movie about a war that was still in question.

This one is about Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent who was beloved by soldiers and by his readers. He was embedded with several companies during the war, but he had a fondness for what is called in the movie C Company, 18th Infantry. He's with them when they're untested, and then joins them later when, as Mitchum calls them, "they're killers." They have started in Tunisia, went through Sicily, landed at Salerno, and are making the slow crawl up to Rome.

The script is a typical "platoon" movie, with various types, such as the girl-crazy Italian, the guy who wanted to be in the Air Corps but was too tall, a guy who gets a record of his son speaking, but he can't find a phonograph that works, and a fellow with no relatives, who fills out his beneficiary form with his comrades. In one aching scene, he has to scratch off the name of someone who has died.

Pyle collaborated with the film, but was killed on an island near Okinawa just a few months before it was released. The Story of G.I. Joe became something of a tribute to him. Wellman made a lot of good pictures and his deft hand shows here, along with some beautiful black and white photography which seems to use mostly natural light.

Pyle is played by Burgess Meredith, and he's treated like one of the boys, though he's small and old (43!). Much of his actual writing is  in voiceover, which gives the film an extra elegance, including the last line, "For those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, 'Thanks pal, thanks.'" As the title suggests, this movie is about the army, which is contrasted with the airmen. Pyle says they get to sleep in their own beds and eat good food, while the infantry lives in misery and dies in misery.