What Price Glory

This patriotic war film is the bees knees for slap stick, witty comedy. The mixture of wussy brown nosing privates and annoyed sarcastic generals provides a hilarious bitter sweet feeling that can put a smile on your face. Not to mention the constant friendly rivalry between the comedic loud mouthed Captain Flagg (Cagney being Cagney), and the irritated Sergeant Quirt played by Dailey, for the cute and innocent French waitress Charmaine. This movie not only made a great world war 1 film, but proved Cagney was still his energetic, pound for pound, hard nosed self even at 53 years old. The only downside to the movie was the poorly portrayed dramatic war speeches and the failed attempts at giving a life lesson. But all around 8/10

What do you get when you combine an over the hlll Cagney with a second-rate cast and first-rate director? A mess. And that's what this is; a mess. It is so cartoonish in spots that I expected Bugs Bunny to pop out on screen at times. Everyone is over the top, and the only good sequences are between the young man and the young French girl, but those are buried under a tidal wave of cornball, false bravado, tired sterotypes and corny dialogue (did I mention the film was corny?).

And despite all of this corn (which is substantial), parts of the film ring true. Especially the part where Marines go back for second and third servings of frontline crap. I happen to know for a fact this is true; as amazingly stupid as it might appear. My best friend during the Vietnam war was on leave with me in Okinawa for a month. I was in the Army, and he was a marine. He had been wounded twice. And he went back for a third time. After we were drinking for a bit, I asked him how could he be so stupid as to go back for a third time? He told me his friends were there, and that they depended on him. I had nothing I could say. So, some of this corn is true, but most of the film is baloney.

Ford might be best known for his Westerns, but he made nearly as many military pictures as he made Westerns (perhaps more if we were to count his cavalry pictures in the military genre). What Price Glory is a WWI picture starring James Cagney as a commanding officer. He's involved with the daughter of an innkeeper, Charmaine (Corinne Calvet), but he doesn't think he should marry her. He pushes off one of his underlings (Dan Dailey) on her, but later regrets it. There's also a nice romantic subplot involving a young Robert Wagner and a French teenager, Marisa Pavan. A lot of it works very well. I love Calvet. She's best known for her role in Anthony Mann's The Far Country, where she played the pig-tailed girl with the stocking cap who was always trying to sing for Jimmy Stewart. Oh, I know she's not a great actress, but she's so damn cute and charming. I love her character here, nice but opportunistic. The sets and cinematography are very good. The one aspect that really harms it is Dan Dailey. He gives a very weak performance and is very unsympathetic. 7/10.

In the mid-1920s, when What Price Glory? debuted as a play and was filmed for the first time, there was a popular anti-war mood, and cultural works attacking the First World War proliferated. In the early-1950s, with World War Two a recent memory and the Korean war still going on, war movies of every kind were at the height of their popularity, but there was no way they could be openly anti-militaristic. Hence, when Fox Studios decided to resurrect the classic story in 1952 it was largely a comical and de-politicised affair.

With a screenplay by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, this version of What Price Glory? uses virtually none of Maxwell Anderson's original dialogue. The job of direction was handed to John Ford, who was known for staging extended improvisations, creating little vignettes of military life with comical drunkenness and good-natured fistfights. In What Price Glory? this is done to the extent that it actually overshadows any semblance of plot. And not just the anti-war business; the romantic subplots seem weak and disjointed as well.

That's not to say there aren't some good things about this picture. The Technicolor cinematography by Joe MacDonald is often breathtaking, giving a haunting quality to the mist-shrouded battlegrounds. Ford was as always a good visual director, often using stark contrasts in depth to bring different ideas to our attention in the one shot. For example, as the troops march off to the front, a mass of drab browns and greys, we see Corinne Calvet in a bold red, white and blue dress – a human flag and a reminder of what the men are leaving behind them. And James Cagney is good fun in one of his purely comic roles.

But there is little else to recommend about this What Price Glory? Various scenes look to have been filmed with an emphasis on pathos, but they don't work within the structure of the whole thing. When a young Robert Wagner makes the central speech in which the words of the title are spoken, it seems barely to relate to the rest of the picture. And it's not the mixing of comedy with the realities of war per se that makes it fall apart – after all this is the basis of such classics as The Big Parade and MASH – it's just that the balance is wrong. It simply fails to take the war seriously enough, and the "serious" moments seem like flimsy little inserts. Of course, if it had been a tight and hard-hitting anti-war drama, it would most likely have fallen foul of the censors and/or stifled the careers of its creative team. As it was, this vague mish-mash of bar songs and army jokes was conveniently inoffensive.

Well, despite having made "The Sands of Iwo Jima", John Ford made a movie about World War I Marines that doesn't really seem to be about Marines at all. I'm not a student of World War I Marine slang, but it seemed odd for Captain Flagg to pronounce Sergeant Quirt his "Top Soldier" and for Marines to refer to each other as soldiers. Despite the fact that they under French command, I found it odd for them to refer to being in the Army, since they are in the Corps. Go figure.

The two combat scenes are amateurish, even by Ford's standards. The acting is not convincing (except when Robert Wagner dies and Cagney manages not to over-act it) and while you can believe the two main characters don't like each other at the beginning, you never believe there's some odd tie binding them together. The character development is relatively tame, with only Wagner and Harry Morgan (Colonel Potter as a Marine Corporal and quartermaster!) showing any depth among the minor Marine characters.

Dan Dailey does play a convincing loud, parade ground senior NCO. He conveys the conniving and womanizing well, but when he is supposed to have finally fallen for the French beauty, it's hard to believe. Cagney plays merely a caricature of the hard-bitten, seen-it-all Marine. His final scene neither convinces you he considers staying or that the Corps means so much to him that he has to go.

The worst part is when a wounded Marine shouts out the title of the movie. It's something along the lines of "Are you going to get in the game, Captain? There's two minutes left and we need a hero. What price glory, Captain? What price glory?" One can imagine that delivered stirringly by a character whose motivation we understand, but instead, it is shouted by a nameless face with only a crazed look. It also would help if the Captain had been portrayed as a glory hound instead of drunken, war-weary yet sympathetic. I guess they had to get the name of the movie in somehow....

I was trying to imagine John Ford's World War I and was sadly disappointed that it wasn't more moving.