William A. Wellman

One of the highlights of American cinema is William A. Wellman's close-ups of tired and unshaved men under stress.

Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).

When me and my brother were growing up there were two films our dad often mentioned, The Ox-Bow Incident and The Men Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). They must have made a big impression on him, but although he did not explain why, they are both rather similar. Black and white, tragic and claustrophobic, about the dirty politics of the taming of the West. Wellman made the first and John Ford the other, and they are among each filmmaker's best. But they also show the difference between them, and Ford is by far the greater artist. Just consider a traditional song, used by both, The Red River Valley. It appears in the beginning and end of The Ox-Bow Incident but with no connection to anything, it is not grounded, it might have been added as an after-thought. It is not like that when Ford uses it, as he frequently does. The song is an organic part of the world of the individual film while it at the same time also links a given Ford film with the others in which the song also appears. The song is part of both the characters' world and Ford's whole cinematic universe.

But there are other things that links Wellman's films with each other, such as those men. The workers, flyers and soldiers; dirty, smelly and thirsty, often desperate and frequently dying. I have written before about another of those films, The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), here is the link. But there are not only men, he made several films about women too, such as Ladies of the Mob (1928), Night Nurse (1931), Lady of Burlesque (1943) and Westward the Women (1951). They too had to be tough and resourceful since life is no picnic. Remember what Kitty got for breakfast in Public Enemy (1931).

Anne Baxter in Yellow Sky (1948).

Wellman had been a pilot in World War 1 and he made several films about flyers, in the air force or civilian. I am particularly fond of Island in the Sky (1953) about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilderness, and while the crew slowly freeze to death a slow-moving rescue operation is trying to find them. The film is pretty harsh, and a feeling that they might all be dead before they are found just grows stronger. But he made all kinds of films, even if they were always sympathetic to those who had very little or were facing unbearable odds, whether they were Beggars of Life (1928) or Wild Boys of the Road (1933), and the cruelty and violence is often quite shocking. He also made a few comedies, and one, Nothing Sacred (1937) is an absolute must. Fredric March and Carole Lombard are having a field day with Ben Hecht's cynical script, and any film in which a small child bites Fredric March in the leg is fine by me.

Eccentric staging in Nothing Sacred.

Wellman made close to 80 films and many might have been uninspired, and if a message is to be put across it is done so in much too explicit language, but there is a legacy there, and many fine films where a particular way of looking at the world and a particular way of filming it; those weary men and women captured in a slightly off-beat and stylised way, including the hallucinatory Track of the Cat (1954). I will end with a fine, and typical, scene from Battleground (1949):

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I have written about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance here.

There is a religious dimension to Wellman's films, but that will be an investigation for a later day.

The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)

One of the greatest scenes in all of cinema is to be found towards the end of The Story of G.I. Joe (William Wellman 1945). Ernie Pyle, an embedded journalist, is spending Christmas with an infantry battalion somewhere in Italy in the year of 1944. It is cold and it is raining and he has gone to the hut where Walker, the officer in charge, is staying. Walker is hungry and dead-tired but up even so, writing letters to the parents of the soldiers killed that day. When Pyle comes in he gives Walker a wing of a grilled chicken, and they then drink some Grappa ("Italian moonshine, you get a purple heart for every third sip," Walker says) and talk about the war. They are weary and freezing, unshaven and unclean, and Walker quotes W.C. Fields that the best cure against insomnia is to get a good night's sleep. Pyle shakes his head whilst talking about the soldiers "who live so miserably, and die so miserably". The scene is simple and so agonisingly real, gaining in strength for being so quiet and calm. The kind of scene where, after it has ended, you want to stop the film, go back, and watch it again,

Ernie Pyle was a real person, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who was killed later in the war, at Okinawa. He was played by Burgess Meredith in the film. Walker is based on Captain Waskow, who was killed in battle in Italy, and he is played by Robert Mitchum in what is one of his best performances. But in the scene described above it is Meredith that stands out, primarily because of the sounds he is making. He does look and sound like a man who has walked through the mud on a cold night.

Mitchum

Otherwise The Story of G.I. Joe is not all together successful, some scenes feel awkward (partly perhaps because most of the characters are played by soldiers rather than actors). But it is unusual, and for the most part powerful. It is not about glory or victory but about what it is like being the soldiers that have to walk for days in pouring rain only to die in the mud, shot by an unseen enemy. Some go crazy, some cry after their wives. We rarely see any battles, we see the soldiers walk away to battle and then we see the empty faces of those that come back again.

There have been many war films, some good, some bad, some extraordinary. This is one of the good ones, and with a few extraordinary scenes, and for its focus and pathos it deserves to be remembered. This year is celebrates its 70th anniversary, and even if you cannot find the time to watch all of, at least watch those exceptional five minutes of two men celebrating Christmas in despair, under the shadow of imminent death.