Impressionistic and moving, The Story of G.I. Joe is a war film with the kind of hard-won poignancy that could only come from the brusque romanticism of a war vet filmmaker like William A. Wellman. Released in June 1945 - a month after V-E day but before the war in the Pacific had finished, American audiences and critics alike responded to this tough-but-sensitive portrayal of the grim realities of the combat soldier, particularly given that many of the real infantrymen sent to the Pacific shortly after production ended did not live to see the finished picture. That sad fact was also true of the story’s protagonist, Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent played by Burgess Meredith, who was killed in action at the Battle of Okinawa two months before the movie about him premiered.

The story’s genesis comes from Pyle’s writings and experiences of following Company C, 18th Infantry through Tunisia and their Italian campaign up to Rome, a bloody and punishing path through Nazi-occupied Europe. The group are led by Captain Bill Walker, played by a young Robert Mitchum with terse heroism and a hint of the smart aleck quality he’d become so known for.  

Director William A. Wellman, who had been a flier during the First World War (his epic Wings, from 1927, would be the first Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards) initially shied from the idea of helming a picture about infantrymen, since the Air Force and Army tended to be so adversarial. It was an in-person meeting with Pyle, the war correspondent who the film would focus on, that changed his mind. Pyle was well above fighting age and had a decades-long career as a reporter before the conflict began, first sent to London during the Blitz before joining the North African, Tunisian, and Italian campaigns with various outfits. His immense popularity among the troops and at home was in part due to his straight-shooting writerly style, which focused on the underdog and the rough & tumble experience of the infantryman in combat. His sympathy and ultimately honesty around the difficulties faced by what was colloquially known as the ‘dogface’ the ‘doughface’, or the ‘G.I. Joe distinguished him as a journalist with vision as well as courage. His most widely-known story from the front lines at Anzio -  ‘The Death of Captain Waskow’ - became the one on which The Story of G.I. Joe is partly based.

When approached in 1944 by producer Leslie Cowan about putting together a screenplay from his work, Pyle reluctantly agreed. He met with Burgess Meredith - a Wellman favorite for the part, and especially excused from Army service to make the film - and the pair hit it off. Meredith is tough but expressive in the part as Pyle, looking practically elderly beside the strapping young Company C soldiers, winning them over with his wit. No detail was spared in Wellman’s search for authenticity, from the use of nine individual war reporters on the screenplay and its casting of real infantrymen who had fought in the Italian campaign as extras, Wellman seized on and achieved a rare chance to make an Allied propaganda picture with both practical and psychological verisimilitude.

Part of that comes from Russell Metty, the remarkable cinematographer whose painterly use of deep contrast black and white would be put to use on a number of film noirs - including Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Here, he reveals his skill at lighting the close-up in particular. The sight of half-obscured and sweat-smudged grunt’s faces, and the ambivalent mix of emotion playing across them, accounts for much of the power in the film (Later, Metty would go on to lens eleven of Douglas Sirk’s films, many of them in stunning Technicolor, but with the same phenomenally-rendered use of light and dark.) At the sight of the first fallen comrade, the camera’s pan across the reactions of the men is all we see of the violence; in another, devised undoubtedly by both Metty and Wellman, the soldiers begin their retreat from a battered dugout position and the camera remains, instead, to linger in the empty bunker with a corpse in the background. There’s a sorrowful inflection to the film’s visuals, even as Wellman’s matter-of-fact classicism gives it pace and action.

Late in the film, Mitchum, angular face sculpted further by Russell Metty’s masterful shadowplay, half-lidded eyes nearly closed with exhaustion and grief, ruminates on the seeming endlessness of the Italian campaign. The locations blend together; the roll call of names and letters he has to write to bereaved families feels never-ending. “The new ones…some of them just got a little fuzz on their faces.”

“I hate to look at ‘em, the new kids,” he says, practically somnambulant, delivering his bone-weariness so convincingly he would be nominated for his only Academy Award for the part. It was early in Mitchum’s career as a leading man, and a crying shame that his near Hemingway-esque aura of fatalistic heroism would be the first of many performances to go unawarded. In the years to follow, Mitchum's stardom - and notoriety, thanks to a minor drugs charge and arrest - would move to darker corners. He could still personify righteousness, but he was entering the era of film noir in time for the shredded minds and psyches of the post-war world, and between 1945 and 1947 he would mostly work in this genre. Among them were the socially conscious concerns of Crossfire, where in a returning GI finds himself trapped in an anti-Semitic murder frame-up, as well as the ethical morass of Out of the Past. Had his Lieutenant Walker survived the war, could he be thrown into this chiaroscuro world of moral confusion and cynicism? It seems likely. Mitchum's monologue in GI Joe almost prefigures the mood of those movies; it's a striking and rather modern moment from a period of war films which could lean jingoistic or exuberant rather than inward-looking.

Nonetheless, it’s a striking and rather modern moment from an era of war films which could lean jingoistic or exuberant rather than inward-looking. The Story of G.I. Joe is about the personal tragedy and struggle of these roughly-hewn individuals; a film that’s both too early to rest on the certainty of Allied victory, and tragically, too late for its fallen heroes to see themselves committed to the screen.

- Christina Newland is an award-winning critic and programmer living in England