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Rating:  -
My father served in the New Zealand infantry Italy during WWII - he always said that this was the most realistic war film he had ever seen. I served in the New Zealand infantry in Vietnam; The Story of GI Joe really distills the grind of the infantry experience, especially the scenes where Captain Walker and his men are living in holes in the mud below 'the Monastery' (Cassino)and are steadily getting whittled down. One of the top 5 war films.
Rating: -
This movie seemed to accurately reflect with a GI's life was like during the Italian campaign of WWII. It did not show soldiers in clean uniforms fighting in dry sunny weather. Rather it showed the grim business of comabt under trying circumstances with characters that acted like real human beings.
The performances were good and the story interesting. Young people who play video war games and think combat is a game should watch this movie to get an understanding of what that generation of americans went through to give us the freedom we enjoy today.
Rating: -
I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without. - Ernie Pyle
Newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle reported from the front during World War Two, spending the majority of his time with the common infantry soldier and most often reporting on their daily doings, Pyle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for `distinguished war correspondence during the year 1943.' William Wellman's 1945 ERNIE PYLE'S STORY OF G.I. JOE is one of the great World War II movies made by and for that generation. It's important, I think, to heed the full title. This movie is very much Ernie Pyle's vision of the war. You can find a number of columns written by Pyle by doing a simple internet search, and anthologies of his war reporting are still in print.
The movie episodically follows Pyle (Burgess Meredith) and the infantrymen of Company C from their landing in Italy to the eve of their assault on Rome. The low-key approach Pyle brought to his writing is duplicated here. There's a gritty realism without the false heroics or gung ho attitude that marked most recruitment movies of that era. It's an ensemble work, with Meredith and then newcomer Robert Mitchum (who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Capt. Walker) standing out in a strong lineup.
This is a movie made by, and for, the WWII generation. The soldiers - your sons, America - are tired and dirty and somehow inured to the killing. As Pyle wrote, and this movie captures, `every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.' They're shown in episodes that could almost be given column headings - The Company Adopts a Dog, Sarge Looks for a Phonograph, Christmas at the Front, A Marriage During War.
STORY OF G.I. JOE is a wonderful movie that, upon release, claimed fans as diverse as Dwight Eisenhower (who said it was the greatest war movie he'd ever seen) to James Agee, who praised Mitchum `(t)he development of the character of [Lieutenant Walker] is so imperceptible and so beautifully done that, without any ability to wonder why, you accept him as a great man in his one open attempt to talk about himself and the war' in particular and the movie `(the) closing scene seems to me a war poem as great and as beautiful as any of Whitman's' in glowing terms indeed.
Ernie Pyle died while with the troops in Okinawa, shot down by a Japanese machine gunner on the island of Ie Shima. ERNIE PYLE'S STORY OF G.I. JOE is a fine testament to a great writer.
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This unforgettable classic, based on Ernie Pyle's "Here is Your War" and "Brave Men", is considered by many to be one of the best war films ever made. Even General Dwight Eisenhower considered it the best movie to come out of World War 2. William Wellman, the director, initially didn't want to make the movie, but after a telephone conversation with Ernie Pyle himself, Wellman relented. Wellman later admitted that Pyle's pleas for the common soldier were so touching that Wellman was nearly brought to tears.
"The Story of G.I. Joe" follows the beloved correspondant Pyle (played to perfection by Burgess Meredith) as he meets and becomes close friends with C Company of the 18th Infantry as they fight their way from Sicily to Rome in 1942 and 1943. Pyle becomes especially close to Captain Bill Walker (played by Robert Mitchum, in his oscar nominated breakthrough role). The combat scenes are brief but very realistic, and no one is safe from death on the battlefield (including the Captain).
This movie is an unflinching look at the daily struggles of the infantrymen, who struggle with the enemy troops and the mud. Wellman wisely used 150 veterans of the army's Italian campaign as extras, and gave some of them speaking parts. Unfortunately, many of these extras would later be killed fighting in the Pacific after the film was completed. And Ernie Pyle would also meet his death in the Pacific, killed by a sniper's bullet. "The Story of G.I. Joe" would be the one and only film he made that Wellman refused to watch.
Undoubtably one of the finest-crafted war films ever made, "The Story of G.I. Joe" is a lasting monument to not only Ernie Pyle's great coverage of the brave American foot soldiers, but also to the soldiers themselves, who loved Pyle more than all the other correspondants of World War 2. Perhaps the best line of the whole film is at the very end when Burgess Meredith (as the film's narrator) says, "And for those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing more we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, "Thanks, pal."
Rating:  -
3.5 stars
Ernie Pyle's The Story of G.I. Joe (to use the full title) was written by committee, and it shows. Episodic and unfocused, the film can't decide exactly what it wants to concentrate on. Pyle, for example, flits in and out of the narrative, making it particularly awkward when, about halfway through the film, The Story of G.I. Joe momentarily becomes something of a biopic by tossing in a superfluous scene about Pyle winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Just as quickly, the movie forgets him as a central character and returns its focus to the company of soldiers it's more or less been following throughout. This is where the film shines, with exciting combat scenes (more so than in some more recent, graphic war films) and well-acted comedic or tragic vignettes about the daily grind experienced by US Army soldiers in the Italian campaign.
Overall, this is an above-average war film with some wonderful moments, but as a whole, it's just too clunky and awkward to fully live up to its hype. (Little, if any, effort was put into restoring the cut for DVD, either--it's pretty messy.) Fortunately, director William Wellman improved on this slice-of-life formula with the tauter, smoother, and more intense Battleground (1950), set in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
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