A personal, poetic reflection on a personal, poetic movie by programmer, director, and critic Gina Telaroli.

Based on the writings of Ernie Pyle, an Americana columnist turned World War II correspondent, and specifically adapted from Pyle’s writings about his time following US infantrymen in in Italy and North Africa, William A. Wellman’s Story of G.I. Joe (1945) starts slowly and cryptically as a group of soldiers in an unidentified landscape load onto the back of a truck and drive towards what could very likely be their death. As they drive away, truck after truck after truck filled with young men, Wellman’s war story takes on a terrifying documentary energy. James Agee writes:

“It not only makes most of its fiction look like fact—and far more intimate and expressive fact than it is possible to record on the spot; it also, without ever inflating or even disturbing the factual quality … gives fact the constant power and meaning beyond its own which most documentors—and most imaginative artists as well—totally lack feeling for.”

Of all his films, William Wellman said that Story of G.I. Joe was “the one picture of mine that I refuse to look at.” His uncharacteristic seriousness stemming from his casting of real G.I.’s—"combat veterans of the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, and Italy”—in the movie and the very real way most of them died when they returned to their duties in the South Pacific after the production had wrapped. His Hollywood actors trained with the soldiers and Wellman insisted that the soldiers be more than extras and had them speak dialogue. Their involvement, and Wellman’s particular direction of them, gives the war film its weight but also a sense of levity and community.

The action of the film is framed by Pyle (played by Burgess Meredith) but everything centers on an everyman, Lt. Walker, worn well by a wearier than usual Robert Mitchum.  The first time Lt. Walker is seen, deftly captured by Russell Metty’s camera, he’s in the background, below and behind two other soldiers, his face given just enough space to be visible. It’s a trademark Wellman move; he loved to film people stuck on the earth, in between things and each other, all caught up with nowhere to go. And whether they are on the road heading to their next destination or in their tents, being transported to a much-needed alternate universe by a seductive female voice on a radio show, these are soldiers that despite their constant movement are very much stuck in the deep and dirty mud of war. 

I myself am similarly stuck in the world of Wellman’s cinema. In the winter of 2012, I found myself temporarily switched to part time from full time at my job (they were in-between films). Serendipitously, during this exact three-week period (February 10^th – March 1^st) New York’s Film Forum put on a massive 35mm William A. Wellman retrospective. For those three weeks I went to work in the morning and then watched double features every afternoon and evening, seeing everything in the series. It was love at first sight, over and over and over again. I immediately read everything I could get my hands on, including his wonderfully touching and perfectly absurd autobiography A Short Time for Insanity.

Since then, I’ve written on Wellman whenever I’ve been able, hoping to capture in my words what I felt watching his films that February. First came William A. Wellman: A Dossier, a self-published bi-lingual anthology. Next, writing the program notes for Il Cinema Ritrovato’s Wellman Retrospective in 2014. I’ve written essays for DVD releases (You Never Know Women and Wings) and books (Manny Farber: Paintings & Writings, DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval: A Portfolio on the Subjects of Mid-century Cinema, the Broadway Stage and the American West), as well as introduced his films (Goodbye My Lady at Light Industry and Track of the Cat at the New York Film Festival, among others). I also had the honor of interviewing Wellman’s son, William Wellman Jr. before a nitrate screening of his 1937 film A Star is Born.

I imagine I’ll spend the rest of my life attempting to explain what I feel when I watch a Wellman film, how they somehow captured everything I love about movies and why I’ve devoted so much of my life to them.

Towards the end of Story of G.I. Joe Lt. Walker laments to Pyle, “If only we could create something good out of all this energy and all these men, they’re the best Ernie. The best.” It’s a sentiment that underlies most of Wellman’s pictures, individuals, usually outsiders, trying to find purpose and stability in the frenzied confusion of life, but also one that perfectly echoes the speech Wellman gave his soldiers before filming:

“One more thing, that camera is just a camera; it won’t bite, but it will pick up everything, and I what I want it to pick up is honesty and sincerity. That’s up to you. Just do what I ask you, I’ll never give you a bum steer; and maybe with a little luck, when it’s all over, you’ll see something up there that will be more than a picture of the infantry; it might just be a monument, and I am going to make it that if it breaks my ass. Let’s go make a picture, huh?”