The Story of G.I. Joe

Rating:
Summary: Here Is Your War
Review:
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without. - Ernie Pyle

Newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle reported from the front during World War Two, spending the majority of his time with the common infantry soldier and most often reporting on their daily doings, Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for `distinguished war correspondence during the year 1943.' William Wellman's 1945 ERNIE PYLE'S STORY OF G.I. JOE is one of the great World War II movies made by and for that generation. It's important, I think, to heed the full title. This movie is very much Ernie Pyle's vision of the war. You can find a number of columns written by Pyle by doing a simple internet search, and anthologies of his war reporting are still in print.
The movie episodically follows Pyle (Burgess Meredith) and the infantrymen of Company C from their landing in Italy to the eve of their assault on Rome. The low-key approach Pyle brought to his writing is duplicated here. There's a gritty realism without the false heroics or gung ho attitude that marked most recruitment movies of that era. It's an ensemble work, with Meredith and then newcomer Robert Mitchum (who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Capt. Walker) standing out in a strong lineup.
This is a movie made by, and for, the WWII generation. The soldiers - your sons, America - are tired and dirty and somehow inured to the killing. As Pyle wrote, and this movie captures, `every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.' They're shown in episodes that could almost be given column headings - The Company Adopts a Dog, Sarge Looks for a Phonograph, Christmas at the Front, A Marriage During War.
STORY OF G.I. JOE is a wonderful movie that, upon release, claimed fans as diverse as Dwight Eisenhower (who said it was the greatest war movie he'd ever seen) to James Agee, who praised Mitchum `(t)he development of the character of [Lieutenant Walker] is so imperceptible and so beautifully done that, without any ability to wonder why, you accept him as a great man in his one open attempt to talk about himself and the war' in particular and the movie `(the) closing scene seems to me a war poem as great and as beautiful as any of Whitman's' in glowing terms indeed.
Ernie Pyle died while with the troops in Okinawa, shot down by a Japanese machine gunner on the island of Ie Shima. ERNIE PYLE'S STORY OF G.I. JOE is a fine testament to a great writer.



Rating:
Summary: Best World War II movie ever made
Review: "G.I. Joe" can only be compared to "Saving Private Ryan," and it manages to be even more effective even though it doesn't have all of the cinematic license for violence and raw language. It makes all other WWII pale in comparison because it doesn't wave the flag. It only tells the true, gut-level story of men in battle. They are brave, self sacrificing and dedicated without the airs of phony patriotism, safely indulged in by those not fighting. They are honest in expressing their fears and questions, and when one of their brothers goes down, their sadness and regret knows no limit. Wellman's masterpiece and Robert Mitchum's best performance.

Rating:
Summary: Best World War II movie ever made
Review: "G.I. Joe" can only be compared to "Saving Private Ryan," and it manages to be even more effective even though it doesn't have all of the cinematic license for violence and raw language. It makes all other WWII pale in comparison because it doesn't wave the flag. It only tells the true, gut-level story of men in battle. They are brave, self sacrificing and dedicated without the airs of phony patriotism, safely indulged in by those not fighting. They are honest in expressing their fears and questions, and when one of their brothers goes down, their sadness and regret knows no limit. Wellman's masterpiece and Robert Mitchum's best performance.

Rating:
Summary: Take the good with the bad.
Review: 3.5 stars

Ernie Pyle's The Story of G.I. Joe (to use the full title) was written by committee, and it shows. Episodic and unfocused, the film can't decide exactly what it wants to concentrate on. Pyle, for example, flits in and out of the narrative, making it particularly awkward when, about halfway through the film, The Story of G.I. Joe momentarily becomes something of a biopic by tossing in a superfluous scene about Pyle winning a Pulitzer Prize.

Just as quickly, the movie forgets him as a central character and returns its focus to the company of soldiers it's more or less been following throughout. This is where the film shines, with exciting combat scenes (more so than in some more recent, graphic war films) and well-acted comedic or tragic vignettes about the daily grind experienced by US Army soldiers in the Italian campaign.

Overall, this is an above-average war film with some wonderful moments, but as a whole, it's just too clunky and awkward to fully live up to its hype. (Little, if any, effort was put into restoring the cut for DVD, either--it's pretty messy.) Fortunately, director William Wellman improved on this slice-of-life formula with the tauter, smoother, and more intense Battleground (1950), set in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

Rating:
Summary: All Thats been said!!
Review: All thats been said about this terrific film is on target.

Thanks to Bill Wellman and co we have a REAL WW 11 film.

No thanks to Speilbergs and Disney for that TRASH they call war films. These films are nothing but special effects shinola and are an insult to the rank and file American

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best
Review: Although some of the acting and dialog may come across as dated, there is an innocent honesty about "The Story of G.I. Joe" that consistently shines through. The story is believable because by and large it is true. The actors are believable because many of them actually were GIs. Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith are superb in the leading roles. This film, along with Director Wellman's other WWII classic, "Battleground", surely deserves a place "first of foot and right of the line" in the ranks of American war movies. It most definitely deserves a place in anyone's collection of great American films.

Rating:
Summary: Quantitative Evaluation
Review: Audio Merits:6/10; Video Merits:5/10;Scenario Merits:8/10; Cinematographic Merits:10/10; Musical Merits:9/10; Overall Artistic Performance:9/10; DVD Extras:9/10; Recording Total Quality:8/10. Professor's Comment: All the war film virtual attributes such as exaggerations, superheroes, subjectivities are absent. I recommend it if you prefer a true story of the real men of army: The Infantry.

Rating:
Summary: A WWII classic.
Review: Burgess Meredith is perhaps a little too beatific in his portrayal of war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the much-beloved Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent who brought the stories of everyday American soldiers home to readers back in the States. The Army infantrymen revered Pyle the way they loved cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who also had the guts and humility to slog it out in the mud with them, and let the folks back home know how they met the war with an all-American mix of grit, fatalism and good humor. The production values of this movie, with distracting backdrops and obviously artificial studio sets, don't hold up that well in comparison to the hyper-real war flicks that came in its wake, yet few movies have captured just how grubby, desolate and miserable the day-to-day lives of the ground soldiers could be. Also, an extended battle sequence filmed in the real-life rubble of a recently "liberated" Italian town is remarkable for showing just how extensive the war damage was -- it was total warfare, and it's amazing that Europe ever recovered from the devastation. A surprisingly bleak, if somewhat episodic, story, framing an iconic, groundbreaking war movie against which all others have to be measured. (One note of complaint: the DVD version has shamefully little in the way of special features, just one brief clip of the real Ernie Pyle taping a news reel interview with a couple of G.I.s saying "hi" to the folks back home, and a series of illegible reproductions of old newspaper columns under his byline... It's really inexcusable that a full-length documentary about Pyle and his reporting was not also included... Oh, well. It's still a good film.)

Rating:
Summary: DVD adds little
Review: I bought this DVD from Amazon as soon as it was released, based on the 5 stars given the film by previous reviewers, and the fact that I have a personal interest in World War II in Italy in particular. It's an okay film; the DVD production adds very little to the original (no audio commentary for example), only a brief film clip of the "real" Ernie Pyle talking to some real G.I.s in Italy. The movie itself has some historical interest as it was made before the end of the war. For example, the contemporary account of the battle for Monte Cassino is interesting. According to the liner notes the film was the first to establish certain canonical cliches for its genre, and you will recognize at least some scenes from later films.

Rating:
Summary: One of Three Best WWII Films.
Review: I grew up during World War II. My dad, a combat engineer, was overseas for three years, so the war made an indelible impact on me that lasts to this day. I remember sitting in the local movie house watching the news reels and wondering whether my father was there,was all right or would even come home again. I had friends whose fathers were not.

He did, thank God, but the experience made me very critical of the typical John Wayne type Technicolor epics that glorified war and had almost supernatural heros and heroics. Those old black and white news reels, shot by combat photographers, showed the real face of war, its mindless viciousness, the numbing stress it placed upon its young combatants and the pathos of death and dismemberment at its most violent.

I believe only three films about WWII caught this realism. 1. Battleground, 2. Twelve O'Clock High. and 3. The Story of G.I. Joe. If there were equally good films made about the Pacific theatre, I don't remember them, but the three above films I think will stand the test of time because of their powerful realism.

The Story of G.I. Joe is about the 'forgotten war', the Italian campaign where the American and British forces had to slug their way inch by inch up the peninsula against well-prepared and led German forces who often fought to the last man. But the attention of America was focused on the Pacific and later, after D-Day, the northern European campaigns.

Ernie Pyle, who is brilliantly portrayed by Burgess Meredith in this film, was the only reason that folks back home, who had fathers and sons in Italy, could find out a little, anything, about this forgotten war. He understood the American G.I. better than any writer that ever lived. My father said it was because he was up front, both physically and spiritually, with the grunts.

Robert Mitchum, who I always believed was a vastly underrated actor, stuns the viewer in his sensitive role as a young officer who grows weary and finally fatalistic regarding the death of the men he leads. He knows it is only a matter of time for them all. His deeply moving performance alone makes this a movie to see. Tragedy at its best.

I watched my father twice try to make it through this movie. He couldn't. He said it was just too real for him. That's a review better than anything I can write.