(Before we go an inch further, and to avoid any kind of disagreement: though it has a filthy connotation in common usage, there's nothing judgmental about the word "propaganda". It is a simple descriptive term identifying anything with an eye towards advancing an idea to its audience, through emotional appeals and heightened rhetoric. Whatever our feelings about American entry into WWII, we can surely agree that plenty of films were made that had a conscious intention to portray that war as unmixedly heroic and exciting, and American involvement as morally essential - including outstanding triumphs of the art form, and tepid, dated garbage alike).
None of these films were more confident about American might or a more smashingly successful advertisement than Sergeant York, the year's highest-grossing film and one of the most rousing pro-Army stories you could imagine seeing (myths abound about young men walking right out of the theater and into the recruiting office, undoubtedly exaggerated but also undoubtedly rooted in some kind of fact). It was the long-gestating biopic of Alvin York, one of the most famous and decorated American veterans of World War I, who only finally caved to Jesse L. Lasky's longstanding desire to film his story when the producer used exactly the argument that York's history would be a great aid and comfort to American patriotism in the dark run-up to a new war. There's also the legend that York would only sign over his rights if Gary Cooper would play him, though that seems to have been at least somewhat debunked, and that kind of narcissism is hardly in keeping with the personality of York as presented in this film, or in the fact that he had all of his own profits from the film given to the building of a Bible school. But regardless, Cooper was maybe the only choice for the part of a Tennessee fella of a certain awkwardness and unwillingness to be broadcast for the whole world to gawk at - York is maybe the Gary Cooperest of all Gary Cooper performances, though I don't think it's anywhere near his best (in fact, I think it can be readily argued that it wasn't even his best work in 1941, and we can pretend that he actually won his Oscar that year for the gangster comedy Ball of Fire instead).
Over the course of 134 minutes that it perhaps does not entirely require, Sergeant York follows the title character from his dissolute life in rural Tennessee, drinking and hanging around with assholes and perfecting his sharpshooting skills, to his conversion to a passionate non-denominational Christianity in the midst of a thunderstorm, to the draft, where his protestations that his faith demands that he be a pacifist don't meet the Army's standards for official status as a conscientious objector. Permitted a chance to look inside himself and make up his own mind by an extremely indulgent commanding officer at basic training, Major Buxton (Stanley Ridges), York concludes that he can make room for both Christian charity and patriotic German-slaughtering, and so he heads off to Europe, for a surprisingly limited percentage of the overall running time; there he commits an almost superhuman act of bravery thanks to his flat, no-nonsense approach to life, and he is showered with all the rewards of heroism that he doesn't want; a quiet life back in Tennessee where he can finally settle down with Gracie (Joan Leslie), the girl he was chasing after the first half of the movie, that's all he needs.
There are things I can observe and things I can only conjecture, but let's try to mostly limit it to the former: the movie's a lot better before the draft starts. Which is almost exactly opposite the point the movie wants to make, but I suspect that there was a lot more freedom open to the cluster of screenwriters, director Howard Hawks, and all the actors, when the thing is about the salvation of a slightly bad man in the Appalachian hills. It is, for one thing, much better suited to Hawks's skills and interests, given his obvious, career-spanning affection for rough-hewn males who we're invited to like even while recognising that we would not, for example, want them to date our sister. Almost as strong as his affection for strong-willed women who are too good for those men and so force them to grow up a little bit. What we might call the "rural" track of Sergeant York isn't necessarily the most robustly Hawksian material of his career - I can't think of another film by the director where religion is much of a motivating force for anybody, let alone a major driver of the central character arc - and I can't help but feel that Cooper and Hawks weren't terrific fits for each other, given the director's seeming preference for sharper, more cynical leads (it's hard to imagine a less cynical figure than '40s-era Cooper). But then, Hawks was the director of that selfsame Ball of Fire, so I'm probably just full of shit.
At times, this portion of Sergeant York feels oddly like what you might get if Hawks set his mind to making a John Ford film: the way that the action slows down and basks in community activity, the prominence given to characters who have very little impact on the narrative, just to add local color. And the ethnic humor, if we can call it that - actually I expect that Sergeant York was meant to have very little humor at all, but the dialogue is filled with curious ruralisms that feel at best tangential to what actual people actually sound like, and at worst like the literally did not care if the entire cast sounded like a collection of buffoons. And having Walter Brennan (who, to be fair, puts in an exceptionally strong performance) delivering many of those lines in his characteristic nasal wheeze does absoutely nothing to make it feel less like The Country Bumpkin Variety Hour.
But even given a nest of flaws, the basic arc works beautifully: Cooper's abashed, aw-shucks demeanor is a perfect fit for the part, making the early, reprobate York easygoing and likable enough that we enjoy watching him, while expressing the character's conversion in tremendously convincing terms that do quite a lot to knock off the edge of corniness that the material would seem to demand. Basically, the actor's body language folds in on itself: without visibly cowering or shrinking himself, Cooper makes York seem less imposing and humbler, still an authoritative presence but no longer a domineering one. The entirety of the conversation narrative is exaggerated Hollywood melodrama, but it works, with Cooper doing all the selling to make sure it works. Everything else follows him: cinematographer Sol Polito shoots everything with a restrained realism, emphasising the characters over everything; Max Steiner's score, while it certainly tells us when to feel and what, tends to reinforce Cooper rather than do his work for him.
It's a simple morality play, and by no means Hawks's best work, but it's solid, eminently satisfying filmmaking, which makes it dismaying when the second half - the war half, the half that we're all theoretically here to see, in 1941 with the threat of a new German conflict coming up fast - crumbles so badly in so many ways. And here I will start to conjecture, because I think part of the problem is that for all of his strengths, Hawks was not up to being a propagandist. All of his best films - which is not to say all of his films - have a degree of cynicism and irony, a willingness to treat the material they're depicting with a healthy degree of sophisticated knowingness. It's especially clear in his comedies, but you could never mistake the way that Scarface or Red River love to question and poke and challenge their characters and the presumptive themes being espoused. And there was simply no room for that here: presenting a vision of war in any way troubled or complicated or even particularly violent was completely out of the question given the motivations behind making Sergeant York in the first place. Sincerity, I don't think, was hard for Hawks at all; but boisterousness certainly was (his other outright rah-rah American war movie, 1943's Air Force, has the same problems, only magnified), and he seems deeply disinterested in making the second half of the film, when York goes into combat and proves his heroism. The film is never less than technically competent, with some stellar effects sequences, but it manages to get oddly boring at exactly the point that the action starts to ramp up, and I think it's because the absolute need to avoid presenting any kind of "war is hell" internal conflict kept the director - and possibly the rest of the filmmaking team - from engaging with the material completely.
There's an anecdote I encountered while researching this review, and I honestly don't even care if it's true: Alvin York himself visited the set to make sure the filmmakers were treating the story honestly and fairly, and one of the star-struck crew asked how many Germans he killed in the war. At which point, the veteran started sobbing. That's an interesting movie: still not maybe a film that Hawks would have been the best director for, though it would have required and deserved a lot more engagement from all concerned. But Sergeant York can't go there: once York has squared his Christian faith with the knowledge that he has to kill enemy combatants, it never crops up again, and while Cooper is exactly the sort of actor who'd have been great at letting that backstory influence his performance even when it wasn't detailed in the script, I genuinely don't see it.
Sergeant York couldn't be any other film than the one it is: in 1941, the audience wanted one thing only, and the studio gave it to them, and that's that. I would certainly not suggest that it's somehow crucially deficient because it takes a one-note approach to depicting warfare, when that was the only way it was ever going to get made. But for all that it's a vividly inspirational film, it seems to have been by people who weren't, themselves, inspired. It's a good film and a great time capsule, and speaking as one with a deep fascination for how WWII-era Hollywood movies dealt with packaging and depicting war, I have only ever been glad to see it. But the story, and even the first portion of the movie as it exists, deserves better, fuller treatment than it gets here.
Elsewhere in American cinema in 1941
-Radio and New York theater whiz kid Orson Welles raises a ruckus with his newsman biopic Citizen Kane
-John Huston, son of character actor Walter, makes his directorial debut with the proto-noir classic The Maltese Falcon
-Preston Sturges achieves the zenith of American comedy with The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels
Elsewhere in world cinema in 1941
-The Indian production Khazanchi introduces the use of pop music styles in that country's filmmaking, changing the shape of the industry
-British filmmaking team Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger make the legandary propaganda adventure 49th Parallel
-Mizoguchi Kenji makes the giant-scale, lightly propagandastic period epic The 47 Ronin in Japan
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