The film took its template from Alvin York's diaries recounting his life in rural Tennessee and his Medal of Honor winning exploits on the World War I battle fields of France. Directed by Howard Hawks and written by a committee of writers including John Huston, it stars the go-to American hero of the day, Cary Cooper, and went on to become the biggest box office hit of the year. It was even somewhat boosted by its presence in theaters during the attack on Pearl Harbor and went on to become an unofficial recruitment film of sorts.
Unfortunately a beast like this must be tamed, and for the taming we got some good old-time religion. After Alvin gets swindled out of a land deal and has his rival for paramour Joan Leslie steal it away, he goes on horseback one stormy night to kill the bastard. And that's where lightning strikes. Thrown from his horse and his rifle split down the barrel, is he saved from electrocution by a merciful god or given a a jolt as a warning by a sadistic prick? Religious epiphanies are always open-ended by nature. Anyway, he gets set straight.
The Tennessee valley sequences, which take up at least half the running time, are despite these weaknesses the most entertaining part of the film. Cooper plays York as an overgrown kid, a good-hearted oaf, but he still has that Gary Cooper gleam in his eye. Joan Leslie, playing love interest Gracie Williams, is a real standout and lends some authenticity with a real-sounding Tennessee accent. The filmmaking, though, doesn't quite support the appeal of the actors. Hawks shoots in a curiously staid, old-fashioned style that looks like it was from the mid-late 30s. In fact, I was surprised to learn this was made in 1941. If I had to guess, I would've said 1937, the latest.
More problematic is Hawks' mixing of true exterior shots and studio exteriors. This simply Does Not Work, especially when characters' shouts produce unfortunate echoes on the sound stage. It gives the story a pictorial hokiness that, while not fatal, adds to the paternalism and condescension the film already suffers from.
After York's religious conversion, he undergoes the predictable personality change but goes so far in meekness and forgiving those who wronged him that it's actually jaw-dropping. He goes to the pair who chiselled him out of his land and offers to work for them, work for them, no hard feelings. What I think's going on here is the writers are setting us against that kind of turn-the-cheek pacifism so we can later accept York's rejection of his conscientious objector petition and embrace of the Army's warrin'.
This requires another religious conversion of sorts, and right on cue America enters the war. York gets drafted, and after unsuccessfully petitioning for conscientious objector status, he's sent to Fort Gordon to begin basic training. He's still a pacifist at heart, but after proving himself a crack shot on the target range, his commanding officer takes a special interest in him. The major prosyletizes a new kind of religion, one about patriotism, sacrifice, and Daniel Boone. He gives York a book to go along with his Bible, a volume of US history, and grants him leave to go home and think about it, with the deal that if he returned still convinced not to fight, he'd be granted his conscientious objector exemption.
Well, York goes home and finds the solitude of a cliffside where he takes his two books with him and wrestles with his beliefs. It's not very subtle. There's lots of inspirational music and brow-furrowing. At least we were spared a Hitchcockian kaleidoscope shot where the two books are revolving around each other like in some fever dream. What we weren't spared was a divine wind that opened his Bible to that "Render unto Caesar that stuff that's his, and unto God all that other stuff" page. Reading that passage apparently settles the matter as York returns to his unit not exactly determined to fight but not ruling it out either. It's a god's will thing at this point. Give war a chance!
So off to France we go, and this to me was the most disappointing part of the movie. There are battle scenes, but they're staged in a way that only makes use of the space onscreen. The troop movements are obviously choreographed for the frame, and Hawks never creates an offscreen world where the larger battle takes place. It's all very stagey, so the world Hawks presents never looks like anything more than a movie set. These scenes also featured the worst death pirouettes of any film I've seen. Seriously, when these soldiers were felled by gunfire, it looked like they were getting in one last audition for the Bolshoi Ballet before falling to the ground.
The sequence where York killed the couple dozen and captured the 100 or so Germans also pioneered the cliche that would show up in repeatedly in World War II films, that of the guy from the Bronx or Brooklyn getting killed just when they thought the battle won. As soon as I heard George Tobias' accent as "Pusher" Ross, I knew he was marked for death. That this was the first film that did it momentarily escaped me. I was just conditioned to expect it. Those guys were like the red shirts in the original Star Trek.
There was a void in this film that by the end took on black hole proportions. There was no discussion, no exposition, about what the war was about. Nothing about beating back Central Power aggression or defending democracy or any of the common justifications. Maybe it would have sounded too silly to 1941 audiences still with memories of the slaughter. It also reveals a fatalistic aspect of America's self-image, that we're supposed to fight, well...just because. The closest York gets to explaining why he did it was with an "it was either me or them" argument. Still nothing about the forces that transported him across an entire ocean to do it. It's interesting this doesn't get addressed.
So what do you get with a biography with little sense of drama or suspense? A story more agitprop than human? No historical perspective, no questioning of politics, that sells war as a right of passage and gateway to fame without all that other stuff? A film with stilted direction, that treats its audience like it just fell off the turnip truck?
Movie stars. You get Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, and a young Joan Leslie, and that's about the extent of it. It's a lot more appealing than sitting through some interminable Godard essay, but I'd rather see this cast in some noir programmer than a stiff Hollywood bio.
