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"The proud shape of the Battle of San Pietro," put together immediately after and re-enacted by the survivors. (Rossellini's formal experiments in Roma Città Aperta and Paisà are not far off.) The threshold into the Liri Valley is the garrisoned village of the title, surrounded by enemy forces and rocky hills and swollen rivers, a costly frontal thrust is the way in. Territorial gain and human loss sum up the war experience, the clarity of maps versus the tumult of the grunt's view. Following the downtime portraiture of Report from the Aleutians, John Huston evokes relentless combat via storyboarded images cunningly shaken for grim "documentary" effect. (An overhead shot of watches on wrists being synchronized could fit in The Asphalt Jungle.) Lines of men, the faces under the helmets, alive and dead. The camera contemplates a soldier slowly disappearing as he marches into the mist, then, as a shot rings out, quickly pans right just in time to catch another dropping to the ground. Gunfire lights up the darkness, quaking lenses embody explosions. The fighting is staged but the casualties are real, carried away in white sheets and buried in mass graves, not quite the recruiting pamphlet the Pentagon expected. The dilapidated saint welcomes the storming Yanks, locals crawl out of caves to start over, "old people and children." A dash of Dovzhenko for the barren landscape now fertile, music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. "An inspiring page in our military history," says General Mark W. Clark, a mournful snapshot of devastation, says Huston. Much of it goes into The Red Badge of Courage. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |