#640: Sergeant York
Jingoistic hero worship, yes — but a damn good film nonetheless
Initial release: July 2, 1941
Director: Howard Hawks
The relationship between filmmaking and propaganda is an old one. From an 1898 series of short films by Vitagraph Studios exhorting the virtues of the Spanish-American War to the United States Department of Defense funding Marvel superhero movies, Hollywood in particular is very adept at using film to push a message, to serve an agenda. Few eras are so transparent at this, however, as World War II and the immediate run-up to it. Throughout the 1930s, Hollywood had avoided offending the Nazi Party as Germany was a hot market for films; but as war loomed, and the brutalities of Nazi Germany were making themselves more apparent, studios gradually began to change their tune. By 1940, the last holdout, MGM, had finally turned its back on the Nazis with The Mortal Storm, a bleak story of how Nazism destroys families and communities. And by 1941, Hollywood was laying the groundwork to pitch the moral qualities of America entering the war with films like Howard Hawk’s Sergeant York.
Alvin York was an American from Tennessee fighting in the First World War, who — so the official record states — captured 132 German prisoners with the help of just seven other men. Like Audie Murphy would years later, York came home one of the most highly decorated and celebrated soldiers of his time, and would go on to have something of an elder statesman status who fought to improve conditions for the mountain communities he grew up in. By the time World War II came around, he was a big cheerleader for interventionism, arguing for the morality and necessity of American involvement. While initially resistant to the idea of a film about his life, he eventually gave in as war loomed, in part because he was looking to build a Bible school. The result is Sergeant York, and it’s pretty interesting as far as propaganda films go. Released as it was in mid-1941, with the national mood slowly swinging away from post-World War I isolationism towards interventionism, Sergeant York uses the First World War as a means of exhorting the virtues of fighting in the second.
The film is weirdly paced. The first half of the film is about York’s life in the years prior to American involvement in the First World War. It’s all over the newspapers, but in tiny Pall Mall, Tennessee, most people didn’t even know there was a war on, nor did they see why they should care. York, at least the movie version of him, is more interested in the pretty girl down the way, and in getting some fertile farmland to impress her with, in the course of it leaving his drunken hellraiser ways to become a devoted Christian. After getting drafted in the war despite his conscientious objector status, his commanding officers manage to talk him into staying in the army and fighting after he spends a ten-day furlough wrestling with the duty to country vs devotion to Christlike non-violence, ultimately coming around to it when, in a particularly hokey sequence, the wind blows his Bible open and on the page is the famous “render unto Caesar” passage — a sort of reminder to Christians that they, too, live in a society.
The back half of the movie is dominated by his time in the war, focusing largely on the actions that got him all those medals: he and the men under his command wind up capturing an entire trench’s worth of German troops via flanking action. Towards the end, he gets a hero’s welcome in New York City and back in his hometown, before discovering that the state of Tennessee has bought him the land he wanted and built him a house for him to live with his new wife. Roll credits.
Pacing issues aside, Sergeant York is as nakedly propagandistic as it gets, appealing to the morality of a country that was still largely Christian in 1941 in the name of doing what has to be done, in this case, fighting the Germans. York’s Christianity is a driving theme in this, to the point that the film may well be an outright religious one, a “Cecil B. Devotional” as the New York Times might once have put it. The whole thing turns out like a morality play, with York getting talked into joining the church then struggling with his religious convictions in the army. The climax of the film depicts York as being not just the primary force that captures the Germans, but the only one; the film holds him up as a hero as if to say that you, too, could be a hero and save the day. Its interventionist message is so blatantly obvious that it was the source of some debate among critics at the time. (And then Pearl Harbor happened and the whole discussion was rendered almost entirely moot.) And as if to further drive home the purpose of the film, it saw regular replays throughout the war for bond sales and scrap drives.
Nevertheless, it’s still a compelling film (no less than we would expect from Howard Hawks!) The script leans heavily onto a thickly regional dialect that I suspect is at least mostly exaggerated, but it’s nevertheless snappy and thoughtful, if a bit maudlin; I suspect John Huston, one of the film’s many screenwriters, had something to do with that. Gary Cooper is fantastic in the lead role, tall and gangly and smarter than he looks (or sounds.) Hawks makes excellent use of lighting throughout, giving the proceedings a bit of a film-noir cast; Stanley Ridges as York’s commanding officer plays a small but important role in impressing the importance of American history and duty to country onto York, which is funny given that Ridges was British.
I can’t say that Sergeant York is a bad film, ultimately — yes, it’s baldly jingoistic, overwrought and borderline evangelical, but it’s still a pretty decent movie, especially once you get to the fighting part. Just remember that its ultimate purpose was to inspire Americans to fight — if not for Christ, then for (some idea of) America.
