Lewis Milestone ("Ocean's Eleven"/"All Quiet on the Western Front"/"The Purple Heart") directs this bleak realistic war drama, which just might be the best WWII film. It's adapted from Harry Brown's novel and the literate screenplay is by Robert Rossen. It tells of an infantry platoon in 1943 that lands at night on the beach at Salerno, Italy, walks six miles during daylight, and takes out a farmhouse defended by Nazis. Ironically titled, as the walk to the farmhouse and the subsequent action was no piece of cake. The black and white film marvelously captures in an unsentimental way the banter of the grunts, their boredom and fears.
Dana Andrews is terrific as he stars as the hard-nosed Sgt. Tyne, a platoon squad leader who through a series of deaths ends up assuming command of his platoon.
The film is less concerned with plot or antiwar sentiments, as it is with honest characterizations and showing how the ordinary soldiers carries out his job in a battle zone. Richard Conte and George Tyne, two machine gunners, needle each other and trade banter as they walk to the destination. John Ireland composes letters to his sister Frances in his head, such as the letter framed during the farmhouse skirmish where he says out loud "Dear Frances, we just blew a bridge and took a farmhouse. It was so easy... so terribly easy." Though the platoon met with casualties, Ireland made it out alive and goes on to live another day for another fight. Which just might be what it's all about for the soldier.
One of the best movies to have come out of World War II literately scripted by Robert Rossen from Harry Brown's fine novel, and making marvellous use of the repetitive rhythms of GI banter (with the cheery Conte's Nobody dies!, for instance, gradually assuming the quality of an ironic incantation). Discreet, dispassionate, and subtly poetic, it traces the experiences, through one brief action, of an infantry platoon which 'came across the sea to sunny Italy and took a little walk in the sun'. Characterisation is sharp and simple, the focus kept strictly to the immediate realities of fear and boredom, so that there is none of the special pleading of Milestone's earlier All Quiet on the Western Front. Here messages are left to take care of themselves, although the introspective Ireland's habit of composing letters to his sister in his head is used more than once to subversive effect. 'We just blew a bridge and took a farmhouse' he begins after the action in which a lot of his platoon died, 'It was easy...so terribly easy': a rare acknowledgement at that time of every soldier's innocently selfish joy that he didn't die
New York Times 12th Jan 1946.
"A Walk in the Sun" is unquestionably one of the finest, sincerest pictures about the war.
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