Sangue por Glória

What do you get when you combine an over the hlll Cagney with a second-rate cast and first-rate director? A mess. And that's what this is; a mess. It is so cartoonish in spots that I expected Bugs Bunny to pop out on screen at times. Everyone is over the top, and the only good sequences are between the young man and the young French girl, but those are buried under a tidal wave of cornball, false bravado, tired sterotypes and corny dialogue (did I mention the film was corny?).

And despite all of this corn (which is substantial), parts of the film ring true. Especially the part where Marines go back for second and third servings of frontline crap. I happen to know for a fact this is true; as amazingly stupid as it might appear. My best friend during the Vietnam war was on leave with me in Okinawa for a month. I was in the Army, and he was a marine. He had been wounded twice. And he went back for a third time. After we were drinking for a bit, I asked him how could he be so stupid as to go back for a third time? He told me his friends were there, and that they depended on him. I had nothing I could say. So, some of this corn is true, but most of the film is baloney.

One of the great anti-war plays of the 1920s was Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory. The play expressed popular American feeling that we were never going to war again like that and endure the slaughter in those trenches in France that occurred in the short time we were there. Remember we only declared war in 1917 and the thing had been going on in Europe for three years by the time we got there.

One of the things Woodrow Wilson as President and the American Expeditionary Force commander John Pershing insisted on was that the American army when fully trained would fight as a unit and not just be replacement troops for the French and British already there. They deviated only once from that policy when the American First Marine Division became the first American troops in battle in World War I at Belleau Wood. These Marines depicted here are part of those troops.

John Ford is one of our great American directors and when he does his own work on material never before used he's produced some remarkable cinema. But here he takes a serious anti-war play and turns it into one of his service comedies. There certainly are comedic elements in What Price Glory, but it's a serious picture.

The original silent film version done by Raoul Walsh was faithful to Maxwell Anderson's spirit and introduced those two Marines Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen who were so popular as Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt that they went and starred in a slew of buddy films. In fact they and James Cagney and Pat O'Brien introduced and popularized the buddy film genre.

Cagney steps into McLaglen shoes here and Dan Dailey plays Sergeant Quirt. They played two belligerent oafs in this and play them well, but no one ever thought of re-teaming them.

John Ford should have let this classic alone.

Built around cynicism and a love triangle that reminds me more of lesser Wilder or maybe even lesser Hawks than lesser John Ford, What Price Glory is a bit of a mess of a film about two romantic rivals competing over the affections of one woman with the backdrop of the First World War. A remake of a 1926 silent film starring long-time Ford stalwart Victor McLaglan (who does not appear in this film), it feels like Ford tried to twist a screenplay that didn't fit his sensibilities and only got so far, ending with a final product that never feels like it settles into one kind of story to tell.

Captain Flagg (James Cagney) leads a battalion of American troops behind the trench lines near the German front, having made his headquarters in a small French town where his men frequent the café and inn owned by the father of Charmaine (Corinne Calvet) with whom Flagg is having a love affair. Into this situation comes Flagg's newest officer, First Sergeant Quirt (Dan Dailey), who is to take responsibility for the welfare and training of the new recruits as top sergeant. The problem is that Flagg and Quirt have a history back in the Philippines when Quirt stole Flagg's girl, a girl Flagg had planned on marrying. The first half of the film is a borderline light comedy about the two men reigniting their animosity (having a pair of quick and impromptu boxing matches in Flagg's office), Quirt taking advantage of Flagg's trip to Paris when he leaves Charmaine behind by courting the pretty French girl, and Flagg trying to figure out if he's going to punish Quirt by forcing Quirt to leave Charmaine or marry her. There are other events, like Private Lewisohn (Robert Wagner) falling for another French girl Nicole Bouchard (Marisa Pavan), giving us the only remnants of the original idea of making the film a musical when Nicole sings a song to Lewisohn.

Then the battalion gets called to the front, and I thought I knew where the film was going to go. I thought, this being a John Ford film, the two men, Flagg and Quirt, would bond over their mutual experiences at the front. One of them would die in action, and the other would go back to Charmaine to marry her as much out of love for the girl as out of a sense of duty to the fallen comrade. I was confident for about twenty minutes as the film gained the kind of sober seriousness movies about trench warfare in World War I generally receive.

However, that's not what I actually got. Now, I'm not lukewarm on the film because it didn't play out as I expected. I'm lukewarm on it because what actually played out is some combination of not very good and confused. There's a serious tonal issue that begins popping up that never goes away that I feel is a symptom of a deeper problem and not the problem itself. The love triangle simply ends up continuing.

Flagg has been given a mission to sneak across enemy lines and capture a German officer in order to extract information about a potential big push by the Germans supposedly coming up soon. After sending several young men to die in one effort, Flagg, desperate to go back to Charmaine and deny Quirt the wedding Flagg himself had arranged for the pair, suddenly realizing the depths of his emotions for Charmaine, takes Quirt across the lines where they almost capture a German colonel who dies in the retreat back to the American lines. Then...in front of a wounded young soldier, Lewisohn brings in a German lieutenant randomly. It's almost comedic how the German prisoner suddenly appears right after Flagg and Quirt (who's been wounded and will be going back to the rear to potentially marry Charmaine) deliver their news of their failure. And then it becomes a chase as Flagg tries to figure out a way back to the rear while Quirt gets sent to a military hospital to deal with his wounds.

The cynicism of the two as they finally confront Charmaine, who goes from a fun cinematic creation in the beginning to a frustratingly indecisive and passive character by the end, trying to decide things as they get very quickly drunk and over a single hand of five card poker, feels nothing like what John Ford would deliver. This is where I began having my thoughts about the film feeling more at home in the body of work with either Wilder or Hawks. It wouldn't suddenly be a good film if the other two had made it, but it would just more naturally fit with the films around it. Ford is usually too heartfelt to offer up something this cynical.

And that cynicism is really what bothers me because it doesn't really feel like it belongs, which is seemingly a weird thing to say about a movie about World War I. Movies about The Great War generally should be cynical because of the wanton human suffering it caused, but the hour and a half that preceded that descent into cynicism doesn't support this. The film isn't actually about the waste of human life that was the war. The same story could have been told in the setting of World War II, to be honest, and not much would have needed to change outside the setting of the battle. It's about a love triangle in the time of war, the temporal nature of life in a warzone (reminding me in particular of They Were Expendable), and...then it seems to go off the deep end. The final moments of the film try to walk back the cynicism as well, with both Flagg and Quirt deciding to say goodbye to Charmaine forever to join up with the Big Push, as though it's Ford, in the movie's closing, trying to insert that common motif of the brotherhood of arms that is the military. But it creates this real whiplash at the ending.

Cagney also feels wrong for the role of Flagg. He may actually be part of the problem with the tone of the latter parts of the film because he simply cannot calm down in a scene. He has to be the center of attention, even if the scene is quiet. Dan Dailey fares better as Quirt, though since he's often sharing scenes with Cagney he can sometimes get lost. The character of Charmaine may end up devolving a bit in the face of the two men fighting over her (I would have really liked it if she had simply walked out on both men during the poker game, but alas, she does not), but Corinne Calvet has a wonderful sense of life and sadness about her that mostly makes up for the latter changes in her character. Wagner also has a certain melancholy and innocence that the movie can't quite take advantage of.

It's also often quite nice to look at. Once again returning to use Technicolor, Ford used color well and intelligently, especially in the trenches. There's a moment where Lewisohn moves into the doorway of a shelter, infused with red-lit fog in the corner of the frame, and it's quite striking. There are also moments in No Man's Land that could be considered beautiful if not for the brutality on display.

I'm now curious to watch the original 1926 film to see if that shares some of the same problems or even ends the same way. Ford was famous for using scripts as recommendations as much as an actual guide, and it wouldn't surprise me if he had riffed a lot of the action on screen with his actors (abusing them all the way, surely) while never really addressing how what he was doing was going to affect the overall film. Its opening is too nice, and its second half is too handsome to dismiss the film out of hand. However, it's really not any kind of lost gem.

Ford might be best known for his Westerns, but he made nearly as many military pictures as he made Westerns (perhaps more if we were to count his cavalry pictures in the military genre). What Price Glory is a WWI picture starring James Cagney as a commanding officer. He's involved with the daughter of an innkeeper, Charmaine (Corinne Calvet), but he doesn't think he should marry her. He pushes off one of his underlings (Dan Dailey) on her, but later regrets it. There's also a nice romantic subplot involving a young Robert Wagner and a French teenager, Marisa Pavan. A lot of it works very well. I love Calvet. She's best known for her role in Anthony Mann's The Far Country, where she played the pig-tailed girl with the stocking cap who was always trying to sing for Jimmy Stewart. Oh, I know she's not a great actress, but she's so damn cute and charming. I love her character here, nice but opportunistic. The sets and cinematography are very good. The one aspect that really harms it is Dan Dailey. He gives a very weak performance and is very unsympathetic. 7/10.

Marine buddies James Cagney (as Captain Flagg) and Dan Dailey (as Sergeant Quirt) carouse through World War I, and eventually become rivals for the affections of beautifully-proportioned Frenchwoman Corinne Calvet (as Charmaine). Newly arriving from Philadelphia, handsome 22-year-old Robert Wagner (as Private Lewisohn) is attracted to local 17-year-old Marisa Pavan (as Nicole Bouchard). The pretty, dark-haired girl's father is upset. Rivaling Mr. Wagner for handsomeness, Craig Hill (as Aldrich) asks the titular question, "What price glory?" Future TV stars William Demarest and Harry Morgan support the troops...

This successful stage comedy-drama became a huge "silent" film hit for Fox in 1926, winning Quigley Publications "Best Picture" award and rising high in everyone's "Ten Best" list for the year. This 1952 re-make did not score as well with audiences...

One of the original film's "all-talking" comedy sequels was the semi-musical "The Cock-Eyed World" (1929), which is how this project was initially envisioned. We have colorful cinematic sets, a few remaining musical performances and stage-lighting techniques. Director John Ford and the Fox personnel assembled were much more aware of the earlier films, helping to explain this misfire. The story began as an anti-war statement; while present, the point gets lost in the inebriated interplay between Mr. Cagney and Mr. Dailey. The actors are forced to alternate between broad "F Troop"-style antics and the accumulation of dead bodies.

***** What Price Glory (7/25/52) John Ford ~ James Cagney, Dan Dailey, Corinne Calvet, Robert Wagner