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: "Island in the Sky" (1953)

"Island in the Sky" is something of a progenitor of the modern disaster flick. It's more limited in scope, with just five men trapped in the Canadian tundra when their plane is blown off course and runs out of fuel. But it has all the hallmarks of the disaster genre -- an existential threat, mounting tension leading to antagonism amongst the survivors, a brief early hope for rescue that is soon dashed, and eventual salvation for most, due largely to their own ingenuity and grit.

Director William A. Wellman was a World War I pilot and aviation nut who often returned to aerial spectacles whenever he could. The footage of mid-century transport planes cruising around frozen mountaintops and forests is indeed breathtaking, though it gets a bit old after a while.

Written by Ernest K. Gaan, "Island" was based on Gann's own novel, a fictionalized version of a real-life rescue in which he took part as a search pilot in 1943. I found the entire film rather flat and emotionless, filled with a bunch of stock characters -- with one or two notable exceptions.

The movie is best at depicting the quiet camaraderie of the civilian airline pilots recruited at the start of World War II, who as the narration (provided by Wellman himself) describes, are "of the Army but not in the Army." They fly long, grueling supply runs in dangerous weather and even uncharted territories, but are afforded a great deal of autonomy from the military command.

The title refers to the psychological sense of calm that pilots construct for themselves. They endeavor in a dangerous vocation that could lead to the death of their entire crew based on a single mistake. So they compensate by projecting a demeanor of unflappability that can be soothing to those around them, but takes a toll on their own psyche.

John Wayne plays Dooley, the steely captain who manages to land his plane in an ice storm, and then becomes the father/protector for his young charges. He must carefully ration the food, try to contact help using the plane's failing batteries to power the transmitter, and keep his men from losing their heads.

One of them does lose his head, co-pilot Frank Lovatt (Sean McClory), who wanders off into a storm and becomes snow blind. In perhaps the film's only moment of true power, Wellman pulls back the camera on Lovatt's body being quickly covered with falling snow to reveal that the man is actually only a few feet from the tail section of his plane.

Wayne was much praised for his performance, since he largely abandons the familiar cocky persona and embodies the role of a man up to his neck in panicky fear, laboring hard not to show it.

The other three crew members are pretty standard archetypes -- a no-nonsense galoot, a hyperactive radioman and a fresh-faced kid with a new baby at home. They never make any sort of real impact as distinctive characters.

Similarly, the fellow pilots who take up the search for Dooley and his crew are standard issue, and include James Arness as a big bruiser.

The one actor I couldn't keep my eyes off of is Andy Devine as Willie Moon, the unofficial leader of the search effort. The size of a buffalo and as cool as a cat, Moon likes to seem unperturbed by everything. At one point his crewman accuses him of appearing to actually care about something, and Willie furiously denies it.

Devine gives him all sorts of little signatory tics, like using a clothespin in the cockpit to hold his cigarette, or using a little grabber tool to work the comm switches rather than trying to shift his tremendous bulk.

As was frequent with Wellman's films, women are shunted to a far back burner. We only glimpse two or three female characters in flashback or telephone cutaway scenes. I get the sense Wellman included even those only begrudgingly.

A couple of nits I'd like to pick: when the other planes are searching for the lost crew, they fly in a close formation together rather than spreading out -- not a very effective way to cover lots of ground. Also, despite the frigid temperature of minus-70 degrees being repeated ad nauseum to pump up audience's sense of peril, none of the actors' breath is ever visible.

For a flick based on a true story, "Island in the Sky" feels like bunch of studio hooey.