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In 1918, in Bar-de-Duc, France, the leader of a company of Marines in the front, Captain Flagg (James Cagney), receives a group of green replacements and his disaffection, the tough Sergeant Quirt (Dan Dailey). Their rivalry increases when they both feel attracted by the same easy woman and daughter of the local innkeeper, Charmaine (Corinne Calvet).

What a disappointing and silly parody of war this "What Price Glory" is! Directed by John Ford and with James Cagney in the cast, I could not believe that this film would be so weak. Today I have watched "The Road to Glory", a great anti-war movie directed by Howard Hawks that shows the barbarian life in the trenches in WWI. However, John Ford has made neither a comedy (like Robert Altman's "MASH"), nor a romance or drama or war movie. Actually it is a messy feature, too silly and not funny for a comedy, too heavy for a romance and unreal for a drama or war, but with a magnificent cinematography and a lovely Corinne Calvet. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Sangue por Glória" ("Blood for Glory")

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.

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.

One of the great anti-war plays of the 1920s was Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory. The play expressed popular American feeling that we were never going to war again like that and endure the slaughter in those trenches in France that occurred in the short time we were there. Remember we only declared war in 1917 and the thing had been going on in Europe for three years by the time we got there.

One of the things Woodrow Wilson as President and the American Expeditionary Force commander John Pershing insisted on was that the American army when fully trained would fight as a unit and not just be replacement troops for the French and British already there. They deviated only once from that policy when the American First Marine Division became the first American troops in battle in World War I at Belleau Wood. These Marines depicted here are part of those troops.

John Ford is one of our great American directors and when he does his own work on material never before used he's produced some remarkable cinema. But here he takes a serious anti-war play and turns it into one of his service comedies. There certainly are comedic elements in What Price Glory, but it's a serious picture.

The original silent film version done by Raoul Walsh was faithful to Maxwell Anderson's spirit and introduced those two Marines Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen who were so popular as Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt that they went and starred in a slew of buddy films. In fact they and James Cagney and Pat O'Brien introduced and popularized the buddy film genre.

Cagney steps into McLaglen shoes here and Dan Dailey plays Sergeant Quirt. They played two belligerent oafs in this and play them well, but no one ever thought of re-teaming them.

John Ford should have let this classic alone.