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| Courtesy of MVD Visual |
Russian-American Hollywood filmmaker Lewis Milestone was
already a moviemaking legend thanks to winning Best Director Oscars for both
the 1927 WWI comedy Two Arabian Knights before reversing direction with
the 1930 pre-code WWI epic All Quiet on the Western Front by the time he
had arrived upon his 1945 WWII ensemble drama A Walk in the Sun. Though not as widely known as All Quiet on
the Western Front, the film stoked similar fires whipped up by the WWI film
for its realistic portrait of the wartime experience which consisted of long
vast periods of talky mundanity punctuated by moments of sheer white-knuckle
terror.
Less interested in the plot narrative which sees a platoon marching through the Italian countryside in search of a bridge they’ve been ordered to blow up than how the platoon responds to everything that happens on the journey there, A Walk in the Sun initially began as a pet project by actor Burgess Meredith who approached his friend Samuel Bronston to mount a production out of Harry Brown’s novel of the same name. When Bronston ran into trouble with creditors however, the project was assimilated by Milestone and his production company Superior Productions and despite bringing legal action against Milestone, the film nonetheless included Meredith as an omniscient voiceover narrator.
Less interested in the plot narrative which sees a platoon marching through the Italian countryside in search of a bridge they’ve been ordered to blow up than how the platoon responds to everything that happens on the journey there, A Walk in the Sun initially began as a pet project by actor Burgess Meredith who approached his friend Samuel Bronston to mount a production out of Harry Brown’s novel of the same name. When Bronston ran into trouble with creditors however, the project was assimilated by Milestone and his production company Superior Productions and despite bringing legal action against Milestone, the film nonetheless included Meredith as an omniscient voiceover narrator.
Following an ensemble ragtag cast including but not limited to Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Norman Lloyd, Sterling Holloway (Winnie the Pooh) and Richard Benedict, A Walk in the Sun follows the platoon from hitting the beaches to trudging across the Italian countryside as they navigate the woods, hills and fend off occasional fire from opposing armies in search of a German-held bridge and farmhouse. Mostly talky, the film clearly informs WWII films generated decades later with respect to how it zeroes in on ordinary American boys in a foreign land battling the elements when they aren’t battling Nazis. When you look at some of the elongated scenes in Band of Brothers of a platoon bunkering down waiting hours or days for something to eventually happen, you know Spielberg and his production team had A Walk in the Sun in mind.
Adapted for the screen by Robert Rossen in his second collaboration with the director (Edge of Darkness being the first just a couple years prior), A Walk in the Sun though released by 20th Century Fox has the feel of an indie drama due in part to Milestone investing $30,000 of his own money into the production. Despite this, in contrast to All Quiet on the Western Front which was overtly anti-war, A Walk in the Sun like This is the Army still fell under the more jingoistic studio demands of movies at the time driven by the war effort. Nevertheless, Milestone still manages to strip the proceedings free of politics and just focuses on a group of guys being sent out into the wild blue yonder to do a dangerous job.
Visually the film is enthrallingly lensed in black and white by Russell Harlan of The Thing from Another World and Riot in Cell Block 11 fame, giving the open terrain and the roughnecks wading through it a dynamic quality spoken of the same breath as Gregg Toland. The soundtrack itself is a cacophony of original composition by Fredric Efrem Rich coupled with original wartime songs by Millard Lampell and Earl Robinson though a good chunk of them were ultimately cut after co-composer Rich and test audiences objected to their inclusion. Performances from the ensemble cast are all top notch though no single actor takes center stage in this piece, again favoring the eventual Band of Brothers approach to depicting a platoon of disparate men from all walks of life.
As with their Laurel & Hardy blu-ray set and the recently restored 1952 Native American docudrama Navajo, MVD Visual and Kit Parker Films have unearthed this long-forgotten wartime classic, recently inducted into the Library of Congress in 2016, in a new pristine photochemical 35mm 4K restored scan. Included with the set is a second disc chronicling the WWII films of 20th Century Fox (A Walk in the Sun being among the last when the war ended) as well as director John Huston’s short documentary The Battle of San Pietro. Also rounding out the package are selected WWII Fox movie tone newsreels, making this a most deluxe re-release of a now-overlooked Milestone classic.
While not quite the benchmark setter which All Quiet on the Western Front was, A Walk in the Sun does also convey the feel of the soldier’s tour of duty in European lines during the Second World War through the ensemble characters’ musings about their place in the war. Still a realistic war picture for not having bullets fly in every direction at every second, ruminating more on the waiting periods for an unexpected ambush or attack and the terror of anticipating them. Further cementing Milestone as one of the finest Hollywood directors of his day, A Walk in the Sun seen today is a solid WWII picture that offers a still fresh perspective of the combat experience not usually seen on the silver screen in the forties.
--Andrew Kotwicki
