Story of G.I. Joe (United Artists) is an attempt to picture the infantryman's war as the late Ernie Pyle saw it. Pyle himself (played in the film by Burgess Meredith) and nine fellow correspondents supervised and vouched for the movie's hard-bitten authenticity. The result is far & away the least glamorous war picture ever made. It is a movie without a single false note. It is not "entertainment" in the usual sense, but General Eisenhower called it "the greatest war picture I've ever seen."
G.I. Joe begins in North Africa and ends with the march on Rome. Along that long, bloody road Ernie Pyle is omnipresent, but so self-effacingly (at Pyle's insistence) that he never emerges as much more than "the little guy" in the background. The story is well knit together from incidents in Pyle's best-selling books.
Some of the individual soldiers (notably Captain Walker, whose death inspired one of Pyle's most moving dispatches) are well known to Pyle readers. Ernie's film G.I.s, played with no gallantry and with great conviction, come through as vividly as they did in his dispatches. There are the Captain himself (Robert Mitchum), who leads his men to death in defeat and victory, hating every minute of it; rough, tough Sergeant Warnicki (Freddie Steele), who cracks up when he finally hears his baby's voice on a record from home; Private Dondaro (Wally Cassell), who impartially divides his time between chasing Germans and chasing skirts.
Among other things, war is a craft, and G.I. Joe does an excellent job of explaining it. Its action includes some of the most lucid pictures ever filmed of infantrymen at work. The actors, many of them combat veterans, perform their jobs with competence and beautiful attention to detail. One sequence, in which two soldiers, covering and acting as decoys for each other, outwit three German snipers in a church belfry, is as satisfying as a cleanly executed triple play.
But for G.I.s, war is no sporting experience. As Pyle says, "killing is a rough business," and for the most part "the G.I. dies so miserably!" What makes G.I. Joe an unusual picture is its unsparing reconstruction of a soldier's wretched little realities. Beginning with Company C's first fearful, fascinated look at death in North Africa, the G.I.'s lives are played out in endless rain,' mud, hunger, boredom, weariness and fear. The film's soldiers are grimy and unshaven; they do not march but stumble on in utter weariness; they talk in low, tired tones or not at all.
Compared with this film, Journey's End, its closest counterpart in World War I, was a sentimental, sugarcoated, flag-waving extravaganza. G.I. Joe deliberately sets out to show that war is hell. It succeeds so well that it may well be Ernie Pyle's most enduring memorial.