A Too Brief Review of "The Battle of San Pietro".
Written: Mar 16 '00 (Updated Jan 12 '03)
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Pros: John Huston's horrendous on the spot documentary of the waste of war.
Cons: Most copies of the film are a third of the Huston's original, cut indifferently.
The Bottom Line: We can only hope that new restorations will return Huston's "The Battle of San Pietro" to its original feature length.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: Battle of San Pietro |
I hate to recommend "The Battle of San Pietro (1945)." The film, only 33 minutes long, is a fragment, blown apart as if by a German 88 shell, but it was really "friendly fire" that almost destroyed John Huston's documentary about the capture of an obscure Italian village, 40 miles southeast of Rome, in World War II.
Yes, it is a discarded fragment.
Besides, it will be hard to find; it's in black and white; it will probably be in a dismal print. And, perhaps because we are drowned in them now by TV news services, we don't go out of our way to look at documentaries. Still, Bill Mauldin, the superb WW II combat cartoonist, said "The Battle of San Pietro" was the "best documentary easily that anybody ever did about the war."
At the age of 37, John Huston, son of Actor Walter Huston, was a veteran of the Mexican Cavalry, a screen writer (MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, 1932; HIGH SIERRA, 1940; SERGEANT YORK, 1941), a new director (THE MALTESE FALCON, 1941) and an almost suicidal adventurer in many areas.
It is not surprising, then, that after volunteering for the Army Signal Corps and making REPORT FROM THE ALEUTIANS (1943 -- about our campaign to retake the Alaskan Chain from the Japanese), he was chomping for action. He wore tailored uniforms and sunglasses with the best of them, but wandering around base at Astoria, New York, like Ronald Reagan, insisting that other celebrities salute him, was not his style. He arranged to fly to Europe, where Italy had just been invaded by the Allies.
Arriving in Naples, met by his righthand man and lifelong friend, Jules Buck, Huston immediately made contact with great Life Magazine Photographer Robert Capa. His study of Capa's new war photographs caused him to adopt a more naturalistic style that influenced the work he produced in the rest of his career.
With the help of an opposite number, British spy novelist Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Demitrios, etc), Huston made a deal with American General Mark Clark. In return for working on a studio manufactured "documentary," TUNESIAN VICTORY (an attempt to equal the superb British DESERT VICTORY, 1943), and for shooting PR footage of French Colonial troops attached to the Fifth Army, he obtained a commission, with camera, crew and film stock, to make a five reel documentary on the Allied advance toward Rome.
General Clark, considered "a political general," was in a frenzied --one might say, obscene -- competition with General George Patton and British General Bernard Montgomery to be the first to liberate the Eternal City. Clark wanted a safe, satisfactory film record that would make him look good for his presidential ambitions after the War.
An ideal spot for a classic American victory was selected. A team of Texas Rangers and the 143rd Infantry Regiment were expected to capture the village of San Pietro with little trouble, as Field Marshal Albert von Kesselring had his forces retreat up the Liri valley toward their major stronghold at Casino.
The plan given Huston was to interview the Texas Rangers, photograph what was expected to be a brief engagement, and finish with the salubrious effects of liberation on grateful Italian villagers. It would be a little gem for reassuring the folks back home and, at the same time, a useful Army Infantry training film.
Instead, just before Christmas 1943, on the high ground at the entrance to the valley, the Germans chose to fight.
Huston, Ambler, Buck, and the small crew followed the Rangers into battle and found themselves between the Americans and the Germans. General Clark ordered repeated frontal assaults in order to push on; and under continuous machine gun and shell fire, Huston's team took some of the most brutal, authentic battle footage of the War.
They returned after the battle to photograph the indeed thankful residents of San Pietro. It was the satisfactory conclusion, according to plan.
The terrible reality of the rest of the film, however, as Huston put it together, showed (despite careful efforts to cut away) that some tall, laughing, smoking Rangers -- handsome as Gary Cooper or Robert Taylor -- at the beginning of THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO, are the same men being folded into their shrouds near the end. The 143rd Infantry lost 12 of sixteen supporting tanks in the initial assault, and required 1,100 troop replacements.
When Huston showed the nearly 90 minute film to the American High Command in August 1944, one general after another got up and left. Later, one of them said to Huston, "This could be interpreted as an anti-war film."
To which, Huston replied: "Gentlemen, if I ever make anything other than an anti-war film, I hope you take me out and shoot me."
THE BATTLE OF SAN PIETRO was ordered cut from five reels to three. If Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall had not intervened the film might have been scrapped entirely. By the time it of its eventual release at the end of the War, it had been further reduced to about 30 minutes, an introduction by General Clark added (dutifully written for him by Huston himself), and with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing behind the faces of ragged, frightened children, relieved the shelling had ceased, as they climb from under wreckage of what had been their homes.
Famous Critic James Agee declared, as it stood, "The Battle of San Pietro" was the the best film of 1945. In its bastardized, mutilated condition, it has been shown to millions of draftees and RA's in the 55 years since. (I saw it while taking heavy infantry training at Fort Knox, Kentucky.)
John Huston never recovered fully from his experience, nor his witness to Clark's costly frontal night crossing of the Rapido River shortly after. Years later, he described to producer Michael Fitzgerald how the troops followed a steel cable stretched across the River -- right into the face of German machine guns. As file after file of young men started across to their deaths, a major, his hand blown off, saluted each one of them with his bloody stump. Fitzgerald concluded, from that period on, the nonsense of the American movie business was relative to Huston. "John knew honor and courage when he saw it," Fitzgerald observed. "And that vision haunted him the rest of his life."
In other words, if you want to find out where Steven Spielberg got some of his ideas for the first half hour of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998), you might look out "The Battle of San Pietro".
For other Macresarf1 reviews of films about World War II, copy, paste on your browser, and go to the following:
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http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-2AAD-39ABA77C-3A2DB0A4-prod3
Recommended:
Yes
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Location: San Francisco, Ca.
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