#276: A Walk in the Sun
Lewis Milestone’s soldiers walk the walk and talk the talk
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 18, 2020.
Initial release: December 25, 1945
Director: Lewis Milestone
Some war movies don’t really seem to fit into the common expectations of the genre. Few filmmakers seem to understand this as well as Lewis Milestone; his 1930 classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, defied a lot of the conventions of war films of the era, and while A Walk in the Sun isn’t nearly as famous, Milestone would pull it off again with another war movie, set during another war, that’s about the men beneath the helmets.
It’s September 1943. Operation Avalanche — the Allied invasion of Italy — is underway. A platoon of soldiers are being ferried to Salerno. Their lieutenant is wounded before they even see land. When they finally do hit the beach, they are to embark on a six-mile trip to a farmhouse and blow up a bridge. Tor them, the trip is long stretches of walking, or sitting and waiting, bored and terrified at the same time. With the leadership dead, Sgt. Porter is in charge, but it soon becomes clear that he’s on the verge of cracking, and, increasingly, it’s Sgt. Tyne who does the leading.
This is a film about soldiers and what they do in and out of combat, what they talk about, what they’re like. I hope you like dialogue, because this is a film that is 90% dialogue and 10% men dying. And what is that dialogue about? Anything and everything. In some ways it’s like a wartime version of Seinfeld, where these characters who we gradually get to know (assuming they don’t get killed or left behind) voice their thoughts, argue about those thoughts, and constantly bum cigarettes off each other.
And then suddenly action breaks out, the gunfire gets hot and heavy, or a German plane rakes the platoon, and suddenly characters we’ve been starting to get to know are dead, or hurt, and either way they’re out of the war and out of the story. The emotional whiplash is strong with this film; it’ll go from laugh-out-loud funny to just plain sad, sometimes almost instantly. It’s almost like an early version of what the classic sitcom M*A*S*H would be like, only with a lot more major character deaths.
Milestone proved his directing chops with All Quiet; his cinematography in this film is altogether on another level. He likes to use a lot of shots of characters in the foreground and the background, though sometimes one or the other will be dead. We’re also treated to long takes as soldiers walk towards their destination; occasionally, the camera is angled in such a way that we get a glimpse of just how long a line this rapidly-dwindling platoon forms on the road.
Released just after the end of the war, this is one of the unsung greats of World War II cinema, a film that, though forgotten now, seems to have laid the seeds for other films that took a more realistic look at what soldiers are actually like.
