A B Movie—Plus

Joe Mallory (John Agar, Sands of Iwo Jima) is a green lieutenant who leads a platoon from Omaha Beach on D-Day and into the hedgerows of Normandy and learns about himself and leadership along the way. More than one review I saw called this movie “solid,” which is the sort of damning praise this movie probably should get. There are far worse war movies than this—including ones that use archival footage far worse (the 1976 version of Midway, for example, is worse on all counts). This may be a solid war movie, but it isn’t a real solid one.

I fear I’m going to have to come up with new and exciting ways to say, “it’s fine; you won’t feel like you’ve thrown two hours of your life away, and you might even like it.” I’m not sorry I watched this movie, but I may well never watch it again. It makes substantial and reasonably effective use of archival footage and looks relatively seriously at the green lieutenant theme and about the stresses of command, but only relatively seriously. It’s a B-movie with a little more heart and heft than you might expect.

In many ways this movie is realistic. There are no red shirts—people we like and know may die. And people have human reactions to these deaths because this movie looks at the burden of command and how ordering people to face death effects leaders. It doesn’t look tremendously deeply, but it shows an officer on the verge of a breakdown because of grief and stress, and we are not expected to find him weak or despicable—he is a human being who is suffering because war causes suffering. Our hero learns from this and becomes a better leader, though he may himself someday soon collapse under the same stress.

The movie spends some time setting up the characters and the conflict between the company commander, Captain Hale (David Brian), and Lt. Mallory, with gruff sergeant Pete Bell (Frank Lovejoy) mediating their conflict. Brian is strong as Captain Hale; perhaps he just has better lines, but he does outshine Agar. Agar is not strong at the acting thing; before he learns the ropes and becomes a true leader, he often looks like a truculent child. Later, he looks stern because now he’s a leader, and leaders are supposed to look stern.

Before the invasion Mallory’s company undergoes training; much of it is archival footage that is reasonably well integrated.

There are, of course, a number of barrack scenes where we get to know the regular soldiers, and there’s comic relief—so much comic relief. Not that it’s particularly funny; in fact, some of it is terrible. One soldier is a body builder who constantly poses, even when one French woman is almost literally throwing herself at him. He instead talks about how to eat right and then runs away and rinses out his mouth after she kisses him. I don’t know or care if there is a homosexual text or sub-text here, or if someone involved in the production had sand kicked in their face—the important thing is that it isn’t funny or realistic.

Dick Weston plays our primary comic relief—he does a Humphrey Bogart and a James Cagney imitation in the barracks and gives a huge reaction when he gets a shot (See also Pearl Harbor). And it’s not that funny, and when he returns to the unit after being injured on D-Day, he goes through a few bits about trying to extend his stay at the hospital, and it still isn’t particularly funny, though he’s fine. He’s a comic who was hired to be funny in a movie, so I can’t blame him.

But another thing happens when he returns from being wounded: he innocently asks where people who are now dead or wounded are, and his reaction to the news and how his squad mates go from a warm reunion to a somber remembrance has a touching realism that surprised me. This movie is better than most generic by the numbers war movies, just not substantially better.

The combat sequences aren’t the strongest, and if you’re looking for Saving Private Ryan levels of realism, you’ve come to the wrong place. The Omaha Beach landing has lots of good archival footage that is correctly interspersed—it makes sense. We see our heroes on a ship transferring to their Higgins Boat; this is intercut with archival footage very well, and it looks authentic. But we are constantly reminded that the production had only one landing craft available, so some of the wide shots show this in a way that is more glaringly obvious than it is in The Big Red One. We switch between archival footage with lots of ships to the lonely single boat for the new parts, and German footage of beach defenses, including huge guns, to this one group of about twelve Germans in a trench. I don’t hate it or find it jarring or ridiculous, but some people will—actually it is a little ridiculous, now that I think about it; the Germans sort of look like a bunch of reenactors who dug a trench in somebody’s parents’ backyard for a movie.

Combat scenes later in the movie are stronger than earlier ones. The whole movie is stronger towards the end as we know the characters, and we see them face the stresses of combat and as their battles are on a smaller scale. The last two fight scenes are far stronger than the Omaha Beach scene because it is a company,  and sometimes a platoon, of infantry men fighting a small-scale battle—not the mass landing at Omaha Beach that is difficult to pull off.

Not that the other combat scenes are great, but some are perfectly good. They dress up the tanks they have available, trying to hide the fact that they’re not period and do better at it than some. The Americans take a town, and the Germans counterattack with archival footage of tanks, and the Americans defend with archival footage of artillery and our plucky squad of heroes, and it works far better and is more entertaining than my description suggests—it’s a solid little movie on a tight budget that uses a bunch of war-time footage to reasonably good effect and actually tries to say something about the stresses men face in combat.

It’s also the only movie I’ve seen thus far, and I’m not very far, that shows fighting in the hedgerows. This scene is somewhat representative of the overall look of the movie, though I don’t know how to react to someone hitting a tank commander over the head with a stick.

At the end there’s a montage about the breakout in Saint Lo and how awesome America is and about military know how and preparedness while troops march somewhere, towards the future, I guess. The movie was released a few months after the beginning of the Korean War and produced with a significant amount of help from the Army, so this very positive coda may well have been added after the movie had completed filming. It’s a little discordant because this is movie that tries to look at some realities of combat and is not terribly optimistic.

I fear the title of this review suggests this movie gets a B+; I am going to resist all scales and ranking systems with my last breath, but if I was giving grades here, it would be a B- at best.

Recommendation

Buy the Steelbook of The Longest Day  and treasure it forever.

If you want to buy Breakthrough, you certainly may, but . . . if you want, sure.