Reeling Backward: "The Story of G.I. Joe" (1945)

I admit I was confused about the premise of "The Story of G.I. Joe," which I had thought to be a biopic of renowned war correspondent Ernie Pyle. It's probably the signature role of Burgess Meredith's career -- aside from playing the Penguin on the Batman TV show -- and the film also marked the breakout of Robert Mitchum.

In fact, Pyle is barely a character in the movie, which focuses on a motley Army outfit fighting its way up the Italian peninsula. Pyle tags along from time to time, telling their tale as his favored group of "my guys," though their story continues even when Pyle isn't around. In the movie it's C Company, 18th Infantry, which wasn't actually deployed in Italy.

Pyle was involved in the production of the movie, which debuted around the time the theater in Europe was wrapping up. Pyle, who wrote in one of his last pieces that he hated the title but was too lazy to come up with a better one, was killed two months earlier. He personally approved Meredith for the role, with Walter Brennan and James Gleason also in the running.

Meredith was actually serving as a captain in the Army at the time, a fairly unknown character actor whose most prominent film role till then had been as George in the 1939 adaptation of "Of Mice and Men." The Army initially refused to let him go, and the matter was kicked all the way up to the White House. Meredith received an honorable discharge, ending his military service.

Directed by the great William Wellman, the film received wide acclaim and four Oscar nominations, including a supporting actor nod for Mitchum -- amazingly, the only recognition he ever got from the Academy Awards.

"Joe" is a terrific-looking film, with stark contrasting black-and-white photography from Russell Metty. He really makes the grime of the battlefield stand out. Many of the settings reminded me of Bill Mauldin's "Willie and Joe" comic strips.

Overall, though, I don't think the picture has aged all that well, and plays now as a fairly standard "buncha swell guys" ensemble war picture. Certainly it pales in comparison to Wellman's "Battleground" from 1949, which I call a masterpiece.

This is the sort of movie where we see a lot of faces moving in and out of the frame, and just a handful are meant to stick. They include Mitchum as Captain Walker, the noble everyman leader of the outfit who grows grimmer as time goes on and the losses mount, confessing that he often feels like a murderer.

Boxing champ-turned-actor Freddie Steele plays Warnicki, the no-nonsense, high-voiced sergeant who gets things done. He carries around with him a record his wife sent of his baby boy speaking his first words, which for some reason always plays backwards. Toward the end he finally gets it to work, and hearing junior say "Hi Daddy" sends him over the edge.

Wally Cassell is Dondaro, the Romeo of the outfit who seems to have a girl at every stop. Even when they're holed up for weeks in caves surrounding an ancient monastery at Cassino the Krauts are using as an observation post, he somehow sneaks out for his hookups.

Slightly less notable figures are John R. Reilly as "Wingless" Murphy, who washed out of the Air Force because he was too tall, and Pvt. Mew (William Murphy), who starts out as a faceless nobody and pretty much ends up the same way.

One of the film's watershed moments -- screenplay by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore and Philip Stevenson -- is when Wingless marries his fiancé, who's also serving in Italy as an Army nurse. (She was played by Wellman's real-life wife, Dorothy.) The boys rig up a honeymoon sweet for them in the back of a bombed-out truck. He falls asleep on his wedding night, and we pretty much know what his fate is.

Mew is an orphan with no family, so his main role is keeping track of others through his $10,000 insurance policy courtesy of the Army. He makes a list of beneficiaries, which are crossed out and adjusted as people are killed.

Early on the company adopts a little pooch, which they name Arab -- pronounced so it rhymes with "HAY-rag" -- who's always being snuggled on somebody's lap or inside their coat. The captain initially forbids the men from bringing him along, arguing that the dog will get killed. Of course, he ends up outliving all the KIAs, including Walker himself.

The movie is more cyclical rather than having a traditional three-act plot, and seems aimed at relating what the life of a real dogface was like to the people back home rather than spinning a story. The soul of the movie is not the battle sequences, which are fairly brief and sporadic, but in the waterlogged caves where the rain never stops but time seems to.

The screenplay sprinkles in narration by Pyle taken from his actual writings, which I wanted more of.

Since Ernie Pyle preferred to tell others' stories rather than his own, maybe it's appropriate that "The Story of G.I. Joe" isn't really about him. From what I've learned he had a fairly conventional writer's life, combining long absences from home with bouts of alcoholism and marital discord.

He was the apotheosis of today's high-profile journalists, always making it about themselves. Maybe it's time we got back to celebrating the little guy -- but with a more coherent story.

Reeling Backward: "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944)

"Hail the Conquering Hero" is widely praised as one of Preston Sturges' best films, and it earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. But I found it tedious and mawkish -- the 1944 equivalent of a dopey sitcom.

Eddie Bracken -- who bore a startling resemblance to Donald O'Connor, another song-and-dance man who broke into movies -- plays Woodrow Truesmith, a Marine Corp washout who impersonates a war hero when he returns to his idyllic hometown.

It's one of those stories built on a lie, and somehow the lie keeps getting repeated and embellished, despite the perpetrator's best efforts to tell the truth. That's what I meant with the sitcom comparison: An entire plot built around a misunderstanding that could be solved with a few words of dialogue, but somehow the chance never presents itself.

Now think about that. How often has a misunderstanding reached such epic proportions in your own life? And even if it did, would you wait hours and days to correct it? Even if the notion didn't strain credulity, it's an overused comedy device.

The set-up is Woodrow buys some beers for a group of six destitute Marines. They're led by Sgt. Heppelfinger (William Demarest), a crotchety older soldier. They thank him for the drinks, and learn Woodrow's tale: The son of a Medal of Honor-winning Marine, he was bounced from the service after one month for chronic hay fever.

When Bugsy (boxer Freddie Steele, in his first screen role), the shell-shocked, slightly scary member of the group, learns that Woodrow has been lying to his mother for the past year, having a buddy send her letters from overseas so she'll think he's fighting in the war, he insists that Woodrow board the next train home.

The hi jinx continue from there. The sarge insists Woodrow put on one of their uniforms so his mother will be none the wiser. But she tells the whole town her son is returning a hero. When the group sees hundreds of people assembled at the train station to greet Woodrow, they hastily pin some of their medals on his chest, too.

It's off to the races from there. There's loud speeches, four marching bands (playing the title song, of course) and a contingent of local politicians looking to recruit Woodrow to run for mayor against the self-aggrandizing incumbent, Everett Noble (Raymond Walburn). Walburn has perhaps the only consistently funny role in the movie, since he's always either in the midst of giving a blowhard speech or composing his next one.

Woodrow had a girl, too: Libby, played by Ella Rain es. He broke it off with her during his year away, during which time she became engaged to the mayor's son, Forrest (Bill Edwards). She reasons that Forrest is tall, handsome, rich and has many prospects -- in other words, everything a girl could wish for. He is the jealous type, though, and soon it becomes clear he has good reason to be.

Even as Woodrow struggles to tell somebody that he's a phony, Libby keeps finding excuses not to tell him about her engagement. It all builds to a big finale in which they reunite, of course.

Sturges made a lot of great, smart comedies. But for me, "Hail the Conquering Hero" is false gold.

1.5 stars out of four