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Reviews:
by Joe De Matteo
Huge
War movies from the
40s & early 50s are a little corny, very
sentimental and quite glorious. The
characters are bigger than life but very real;
they were people you wanted to be. And you
know, maybe they're only corny now, looking back
on them.
The Sands of Iwo
Jima, Guadalcanal Diary, Wake
Island and Bataan are four
films that jump to mind that represent this era
in War Film history for me. Certainly the
movies of the 60s like The
Bridge on the River Kwai (a 1957
film) though gritty, were more artsy. Sergeant John M. Stryker
(John Wayne in Iwo) and Corporal Aloyisus
T. 'Taxi' Potts
(William Bendix in Diary) are as far as you can
get from being artsy. In fact, they were
but slight exaggerations of the men in my neighborhood,
men who may very well have been to
those heady places, and lived a very inglorious
version of these depictions.
Like an acorn dropping
of its own weight from its temporary hold upon a
branch, there is always the errant bullet that
is the destiny of your favorite character.
Or the men who run into certain death for
reasons I've become to cynical or self-centered
to remember. The Brooklyn accented soldier
who doesn't stop joking or wise-cracking--and always, that combination of fear and resolve,
dispensed in different proportions to each and
every character. Yes these movies were
real to the little boy that I was when I watched
and rewatched them on that snowy black and white TV
screen, some time before now. They were as real as
the Japanese and Nazi flags and medals, the US
web belts and uniforms and other mementos that
we boys found in our garages and attics.
The pictures of our never met uncles and
cousins; those boys who found their destiny on
some far off beach or jungle, or field their
great, great grandfather might have played or
worked on.
So maybe you won't get
as much out of these films as I do.
But maybe you
will. Maybe you'll find your own sense of
reality in them.
Undoubtedly you should
find out.
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