This is one of those movies about a handful of soldiers lost in the desert who must find and fight their way home. But, if the plot is familiar, this is a pretty well executed example.
Combat aside, it's the story of the maturation of Henry Fonda, the bashful, receding, passive, loner of a corporal who suddenly finds himself in charge when his sergeant is killed. Fonda's character has what psychologists call a primary trait. That is, he is excessively something or other. It's the part of him that everyone notices. Whenever we do a statistical analysis of personality characteristics, one of the first to show up is likely to be introversion/extraversion, and Fonda is high on introversion. This is one of the "Big Five" personality traits, if anyone wants to bother looking it up.
There are numerous flashback too, involving Fonda's self-effacing quality interfering with his relationship with Maureen O'Hara. He can't bring himself to declare his love for her, and meanwhile the gregarious Reginald Gardner (just the opposite, high on extraversion) is taking his place. These kinds of back stories are usually annoying but in this case I can bring myself to forgive them because Maureen O'Hara at twenty-two is sublime. Not "pretty" in any ordinary way. If you asked an artist to sit down and draw a picture of a beautiful woman it wouldn't come out looking like O'Hara. Her nose is more like an eagle's than like a ski slope. And her chin is a little larger than would be required to accommodate her lips. And she's not even a phenomenally talented actress. Really, a performance by an actor is made up half of demands imposed by the script and half by the organismic variables the actor brings to the role. And O'Hara's gestures at enacting the role of the girl friend back home are so perfunctory that we readily sense the real person beneath -- and she's radiant. So, anyway, okay. She can stay in the film.
I first saw this years ago on KVZK and remembered it only for O'Hara's presence and for a scene in which a disabled Italian aircraft crashes into a truck full of British soldiers. I just saw it again and those two are still its most outstanding features.
The combat scenes are well done for the time too. It's exciting as well as thoughtful. I wouldn't blame anyone for disliking it because it's just another phony war movie with romantic flashbacks, but in my opinion, although it is that, it's something more as well. It might have been called, "How To Conquer Your Introversion" and been written by a media-savvy politician.
Combat aside, it's the story of the maturation of Henry Fonda, the bashful, receding, passive, loner of a corporal who suddenly finds himself in charge when his sergeant is killed. Fonda's character has what psychologists call a primary trait. That is, he is excessively something or other. It's the part of him that everyone notices. Whenever we do a statistical analysis of personality characteristics, one of the first to show up is likely to be introversion/extraversion, and Fonda is high on introversion. This is one of the "Big Five" personality traits, if anyone wants to bother looking it up.
There are numerous flashback too, involving Fonda's self-effacing quality interfering with his relationship with Maureen O'Hara. He can't bring himself to declare his love for her, and meanwhile the gregarious Reginald Gardner (just the opposite, high on extraversion) is taking his place. These kinds of back stories are usually annoying but in this case I can bring myself to forgive them because Maureen O'Hara at twenty-two is sublime. Not "pretty" in any ordinary way. If you asked an artist to sit down and draw a picture of a beautiful woman it wouldn't come out looking like O'Hara. Her nose is more like an eagle's than like a ski slope. And her chin is a little larger than would be required to accommodate her lips. And she's not even a phenomenally talented actress. Really, a performance by an actor is made up half of demands imposed by the script and half by the organismic variables the actor brings to the role. And O'Hara's gestures at enacting the role of the girl friend back home are so perfunctory that we readily sense the real person beneath -- and she's radiant. So, anyway, okay. She can stay in the film.
I first saw this years ago on KVZK and remembered it only for O'Hara's presence and for a scene in which a disabled Italian aircraft crashes into a truck full of British soldiers. I just saw it again and those two are still its most outstanding features.
The combat scenes are well done for the time too. It's exciting as well as thoughtful. I wouldn't blame anyone for disliking it because it's just another phony war movie with romantic flashbacks, but in my opinion, although it is that, it's something more as well. It might have been called, "How To Conquer Your Introversion" and been written by a media-savvy politician.