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Audie Murphy Collection

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1952, 1958, 1959 / 242 min.

Starring Audie Murphy, Stephen McNally, Walter Matthau, Charles Drake

Cinematography by Irving Glassberg, Harold Lipstein

Directed by Don Siegel, Jesse Hibbs, Jack Arnold

“My temper was explosive… perhaps I was trying to level with my fists what I assumed fate had put above me.” – To Hell and Back, Audie Murphy, 1949

A remarkably self-aware assessment for such an angry young man. To hear him tell it, Audie Murphy came out of the cradle itching for a fight—when Pearl Harbor was attacked, he got one. He was only 16 at the time so he marched down to the recruiting center and lied about his age. In 1945 Murphy left the Army as the most-decorated soldier of World War II. In 1971 his twin-engine plane crashed into a mountainside in Virginia’s Roanoke County killing everyone on board. In the 26 years between the end of the war...

This is definitely the time of year when film critic types (I’m sure you know who I mean) spend an inordinate amount of time leading up to awards season—and it all leads up to awards season, don’t it?—compiling lists and trying to convince anyone who will listen that it was a shitty year at the movies for anyone who liked something other than what they saw and liked. And ‘tis the season, or at least ‘thas (?) been in the recent past, for that most beloved of academic parlor games, bemoaning the death of cinema, which, if the sackcloth-and-ashes-clad among us are to be believed, is an increasingly detached and irrelevant art form in the process of being smothered under the wet, steaming blanket of American blockbuster-it is. And it’s going all malnourished from the siphoning off of all the talent back to TV, which, as everyone knows,...

Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier of the second world war. He was also the leading man in To Hell and Back, the story of his own war experience

Truth is the first casualty of the war movie. Ask a British D-day veteran who has seen Saving Private Ryan. Or a Zulu who's seen Zulu. Or anyone who has seen Where Eagles Dare. But what about To Hell and Back? The veracity of that one is harder to call. It's a 1955 spectacular about the war in Europe that had finished 10 years earlier: the story of a teenage Nazi slayer who, in January 1945, secured himself the congressional medal of honour by mounting the burning carcass of a tank and gunning down a phalanx of Germans. His name was Audie Murphy. He was the most decorated American soldier of the second world war. He was also the leading man in To Hell and Back.