On S List of Movie Reviews
(For optimum viewing, adjust the zoom level of your browser to 125%.)
Sergeant York (1941)
Rate:
3
Viewed:
5/25
5/25:
Were the voters confused in 1942?
It sure looks like so. Just because Alvin C. York was a WWI hero doesn't automatically mean a boatload of
award nominations have to be conferred to everybody involved with the making of Sergeant York. And that
was the year of Citizen Kane and
The Maltese Falcon.
Jeez, what a horrible movie that's very unlike Howard Hawks. It takes 75 minutes to go through the Tennessee
cornpone crap with ridiculous dialogue before moving on to the soldiering stuff. Then, I have to wait much
longer until finally the moment that made the guy so famous that he's been nicknamed "Sergeant York."
Unfortunately, it's not exactly how happened in real life. The following goes like this: "On October 8, 1918,
Private First Class Alvin C. York single-handedly killed 25 Germans, captured 132 prisoners, and eliminated 35
machine guns, all before leading the men back to Allied lines, near Chatel-Chéhéry, France, during the
Meuse-Argonne Offensive." Yeah, sure...a later revision will show "almost single-handedly." So much for trying
to be less fictitious.
The truth is that seventeen men were involved and that the leader of such patrol was Acting Sergeant Bernard
Early. Six died as a result. Afterwards, the military silenced all and gave the sole credit to Alvin C. York.
To this day, the true story remains muffled. It only happened because somebody misread the map and the patrol
accidentally went behind the enemy lines. Alvin C. York knew the truth of what really happened on that fateful
day but refused to acknowledge it while shutting out everybody else in his patrol whenever he made a public
appearance.
As the titular character, Gary Cooper is fair. But an Oscar for his performance? Yeah, right. It's a case
of being blinded by what Alvin C. York did during the war, so everybody wanted to be respectful about it. Gary
Cooper even admitted during the Oscar acceptance speech: "It was Sergeant Alvin C. York who won this award."
All in all, Sergeant York is at best described a military propaganda film, and who knows how many were
inspired by it and then died in WWII afterwards?