War films used to be ubiquitous, like Westerns. If you saw half a dozen, chances were you’d feel like you had seen them all. A Civil War affair like John Huston’s “The Red Badge of Courage” (1951) and a WWI picture such as Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930) stood out both for their artistry and because they weren’t WWII movies, a nearly overwhelming genre unto itself.
Someone wanting to dip in now and get a better sense for the justly billed “Greatest Generation” is apt not to know where to begin. It’s one big blur of stormed beaches, aircraft carriers, and John Wayne.
Memorial Day is, of course, about honoring those who lost their lives serving this country in war, but that doesn’t mean we should view their contributions to life only through the lens of war.
There is no better war movie than 1945’s “The Story of G.I. Joe,” and if you’ve never seen it, there’s no better time of year than now.
“The Story of G.I. Joe” was directed by no less a talent than William Wellman, who also gave us “The Public Enemy” with James Cagney’s definitive gangster turn, the first version of “A Star is Born,” and “The Ox-Bow Incident.” He was a poet of the moving image and an auteur with a lion’s heart. Every Wellman picture plays like it meant a lot to him, but none more than “The Story of G.I. Joe.”
Burgess Meredith plays Ernie Pyle, the real-life war correspondent embedded with an unproven, green company of U.S. infantrymen along the front lines in Italy. With war movies, sensationalism is almost automatic. War isn’t ordinary. But there is nothing sensational about “The Story of G.I. Joe” save the quiet resolve and courage of these men.
Watching it these decades and generations later, it’s almost hard for us to fathom the idea of doing something, no matter how hard it is, simply because it’s right. Not for attention, approbation, another hit of dopamine.
The men answer to each other, their cause, and, crucially, themselves. We might ask, “Why watch a war film if we already know the history?” Or, “How relevant is this to my life if I’m not ever going to war myself?”
Firstly, we tend not to know history. Maybe if we knew it better, we wouldn’t be where we are right now. I shudder when I think of what would happen if I took to the streets of Boston and polled people as to when WWII occurred, let alone the Civil War, or who was president during the U.S.’s involvement in the former.
The best war films, though, like this one, are about much more than actual combat. They’re equally concerned with how we might discover, develop, and transpose those qualities of honor, and doing right by one’s brother and sister, and answering to one’s self honestly, in the classroom, at the dinner table, in the workplace.
“The Story of G.I. Joe” wallops. It’s real. It’s not trying to impress you. It feels completely, unflinchingly, non-performative, which can shock the system these days.
Good.
Robert Mitchum plays Capt. Bill Walker. This is two years before his breakout role in Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past,” the ultimate film noir. Which means, to the film historian, that Mitchum is young, but in war, and in life, there is no young and there is no old after a certain point. There’s the calendar, yes, but that’s not the same. We’re talking the duty and purpose with which we live or with which we don’t.
Men like Capt. Walker answer to themselves first, so that they may be more accountable with those they know. People usually only partake of the work that came out during their own lives, as if the world of film, in this example, began when they started watching movies.
When we fail to cast a wider net, we limit our knowledge. When we limit our knowledge, we limit ourselves. When we limit ourselves, we play a part in limiting our communities. Our world. Things that should have been fought for because they had to be.
Every good fight begins with cognizance. The knowledge of that which must be done. We must all serve each other. Step into the world of C Company in “The Story of G.I. Joe” this Memorial Day. You’ve never seen a war picture quite like it, and you shouldn’t see your own world and our world quite the same way again either.
Fleming is a writer.
