The Story of G.I. Joe

Dir: William A. Wellman

1945

****

Directed by the great William Wellman, The Story of G.I. Joe is one of the few American World War II films actually made during the war with real gravitas and grit. It’s hard to imagine that Robert Mitchum only received one Oscar nomination during his career but it was well deserved here, indeed the film was nominated for four in total. It’s a cracking war film with brilliant performances from a fantastic cast but it is also surrounded with great sadness. The story is a tribute to the American infantryman (known as G.I. Joes), told through the eyes of Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle (played and narrated by the wonderful Burgess Meredith), with dialogue and narration lifted from Pyle's columns. The film concentrates on one company, (C Company, 18th Infantry), that Pyle accompanies into combat in Tunisia and Italy. The friendships that grow out of his coverage led Pyle to relate the misery and sacrifice inherent in their plight and their heroic endurance of it. Although the company has the designation of an actual unit, that unit did not participate in the combat in Italy that makes up the preponderance of the film, and actually stands in for the units of the 34th and 36th Infantry Divisions that Pyle did cover in Italy. The film begins as we see the untested infantrymen of C Company as they board trucks headed to the front for the first time. Lt. Bill Walker (Mitchum) allows war correspondent Ernie Pyle (Meredith), himself a rookie to combat, to hitch a ride with the company. Ernie surprises Walker and the rest of the men by deciding to go with them all the way to the front lines. Just getting to the front through the rain and mud is an arduous task, but the diminutive, forty-two-year-old Ernie manages to keep up. Ernie gets to know the men whose paths he will cross and write about again and again in the next year. Among them are Private Robert "Wingless" Murphy, a good-natured man who was rejected by the Air Corps for being too tall; Private Dondaro, an Italian-American from Brooklyn whose mind is always on women and conniving to be with one; Sergeant Warnicki, who misses the young son he has never seen and Private Mew, from Brownsville, Texas, who has no family back home but finds one in the outfit, exemplified by his naming beneficiaries for his G.I. life insurance among them. Their "baptism of fire" is at the Battle of Kasserine Pass, a bloody chaotic defeat. Ernie is present at battalion headquarters when Lieutenant Walker arrives as a runner for his company commander; Walker has already become an always tired, seemingly emotionless, and grimy soldier. Ernie and the company go their separate ways, but months later he seeks them out, confessing that, as the first outfit he ever covered, they are in his mind the best outfit in the army. He finds them on a road in Italy, about to attack a German-held town, just as the soldiers are elated or disappointed at "mail call": letters for Murphy and Dondaro, a package with a phonograph record of his son's voice for Warnicki, but nothing for now Captain Walker. Ernie finds that Company C has become very proficient at killing without remorse. In house-to-house combat, they capture the town. Fatigue, however, is an always present but never conquerable enemy. When arrangements are made for Wingless Murphy to marry "Red", his Army nurse fiancée, in the town they have just captured, Ernie is recruited to give the bride away, but can barely keep awake. The company advances to a position in front of Monte Cassino, but, unable to advance, they are soon reduced to a life of living in caves dug in the ground, enduring persistent rain and mud, conducting endless patrols and subjected to savage artillery barrages. When his men are forced to eat cold rations for Christmas dinner, Walker obtains turkey and cranberry sauce for them from a rear echelon supply lieutenant at gunpoint. Casualties are heavy: young replacements are quickly killed before they can learn the tricks of survival in combat (which Walker confesses to Ernie makes him feel like a murderer), Walker is always short of lieutenants, and the veterans lose men, including Wingless Murphy. After a night patrol to capture a prisoner, Warnicki suffers a nervous breakdown when, finally hearing his son's voice on the record, his pent up frustrations at the war are released. Walker sadly directs the others to subdue the hysterical sergeant and sends him to the infirmary. Ernie returns to the correspondents' quarters to write a piece on Murphy's death and is told by his fellow reporters that he has won the Pulitzer Prize for his combat reporting. Ernie again catches up with the outfit on the side of the road to Rome after Cassino has finally been taken. He greets Mew and a few of the old hands, but the pleasant reunion is interrupted when a string of mules is led into their midst, each carrying the dead body of a G.I. to be gently placed on the ground. A final mule, led by Dondaro, bears the body of Captain Walker. One by one, the old hands reluctantly come forth to express their grief in the presence of Walker's corpse. "Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road, all alone." Ernie joins the company as it goes down the road, narrating its conclusion: "For those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, 'Thanks pal, thanks.'" Casting of the role of Ernie Pyle began in June 1944, after speculation about the role brought forth a large number of names as possibilities to producer Lester Cowan. Pyle was seen by Americans as part saint, part seer, and part common man, and himself pleaded with a fellow correspondent, headed to Hollywood to contribute to the storyline: "For God's sake, don't let them make me look like a fool.” The choice narrowed down quickly to three character actors resembling Pyle or his perceived persona: James Gleason, Walter Brennan, and Meredith, who was then little-known and serving as a captain in the Army. Meredith was chosen because he was lesser known. Cowan was advised that if Capt. Meredith appeared in the film, all profits would have to be donated to the Army Emergency Relief Fund, and the Army refused to release him from active duty. According to Meredith, the Army was overruled by presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, and his honorable discharge from the Army was approved personally by General George C. Marshall. Meredith himself spent time with Pyle while the correspondent recuperated in New Mexico from the emotional after effects of surviving an accidental bombing by the Army Air Forces at the start of Operation Cobra in Normandy. Although filmed with the cooperation of Pyle, the film premiered two months to the day after he was killed in action on Ie Shima during the invasion of Okinawa. In his February 14, 1945, posting entitled "In the Movies", Pyle commented: "They are still calling it The Story of G.I. Joe. I never did like the title, but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try." Most of the extras were actual GIs in the process of being transferred from the war in Europe to the Pacific. Many of them were killed in the fighting on Okinawa alongside Pyle never having seen the movie in which they appeared. It’s a great film full of sadness. It feels incredibly real because it is real, the actors were solders and the war happening behind them really was the war. It’s incredible when you think about it, a great old-school Hollywood war film and a historical document at the same time. An incredible film.