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The Wake Island Store
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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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| Awards & Nominations: IMdb | Full Cast & Credits: IMdb |
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