GROSS/32 1941 - killing for peace
A hit biopic and a precision propaganda weapon
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
SERGEANT YORK, HOWARD HAWKS, WARNER BROTHERS, 1941, 134 MINUTES. GARY COOPER, WALTER BRENNAN, JOAN LESLIE
Sergeant York, the top-grossing film of 1941, is an impeccable work of art, a parable about faith and hard work. It’s war propaganda and a kind of Conservative agitprop masterpiece too. I don’t usually do this but, since this one’s based on a true story, I think we’ll need a proper synopsis:
It’s 1917. A young and painfully unworldly man called Alvin York farms a patch of stony land in an isolated valley in Tennessee. He lives in a one-room house with his God-fearing mother and two younger siblings. He works hard but he’s a bit of a lad and likes to go on a bender with his mates and shoot holes in things every now and then. But there comes a moment in a storm - an actual lightning bolt is involved - and he gets religion. And he really gets it. His interpretation of the ten commandments makes of him a committed pacifist. So things get complicated when he’s conscripted to fight in France. There’s a splendid, civilised to-and-fro with his superior officers and he’s given time off to think about whether he wants to kill for his country. He goes home and takes to the Tennessee hills for some contemplation. Luckily for the army, he decides he’ll kill if he’s asked to, but only for the greater good. Once in France he’s quickly called upon to do just that and his remarkable heroism saves his platoon and results in the capture of 132 German prisoners. Alvin is soon a national hero, acquires a chestful of medals (including an actual Légion d'honneur) and is given the celebrity treatment on his return home. Even the Manhattan ticker-tape parade doesn’t go to his head, though, and he remains a humble man refusing every offer of money or fame that’s made him. The end.
Critic David Thomson (yes, I do quote his Biographical Dictionary every week) says director Howard Hawks puts the camera “in the most natural and least obtrusive place” and asks his characters to act in dialogue with him, in his position at the side of the camera, not with the camera itself or the audience or the world beyond. The effect is we seem always to be in a more intimate relation with his actors, absorbing their conversation, learning and forming ideas about their characters.
In film after film we stop and look at Hawks’ characters while they work something out or try to communicate their beliefs or express their love for others. Curious about this I watched his 1959 Rio Bravo, which is kind of cheesy (it has a Dean Martin-Ricky Nelson duet towards the end) and it’s there too. John Wayne, Angie Dickinson, Dean Martin, even funny old-timer Walter Brennan - all are given time to explain themselves, very directly. It’s disarming, beautiful even.
If Howard Hawks had been at Gethsemane his close-up of Christ in his agony would have become the definitive image. And we’d have known the man better, understood his suffering and his love for humanity.
So in this film we spend a lot of time looking at Alvin - soulful everyman Gary Cooper - while he figures out some pretty consequential stuff - belief, war, love. He’s always a pace or two behind the more worldly folk around him but unwaveringly true to God and himself. Everybody loves him. We love him. I’m tempted to say that only Gary Cooper could do this, although I think I’d be wrong, there are plenty of direct, uncomplicated, uncynical stars, but he does it here so affectingly (as he does in High Noon, Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town).
Propaganda unit
In this movie, which was made and released at the absolute peak of America’s most consequential 20th-Century dilemma - whether or not to join the second world war - Hawks is at his most on-message. An ideological communicator and an unashamed propagandist for American participation in the war. He’s like a Brecht for the American way or one of those nameless movie technicians who made the Soviet films about steelworkers and heroic mothers that they projected from the revolutionary agit-trains. What Hawks is selling, though, is fully in the American idiom: self-reliance, hard work, land, thrift and faith in God.
Hawks’ ensemble is an astonishing unity, really a joyful thing. His cast delivers this down-home propaganda like a well-oiled machine, like a bus-load of missionaries sent to convert the unconvinced. There’s Margaret Wycherley as York’s stoical, God-fearing mother, who communicates the whole history of her land and community with only a handful of lines and an essentially static mien; Walter Brennan (a Hawks regular) as the humane pastor who serves his flock from his general store, when he’s not in church, with the patience of a tolerant father; the streetwise GIs from all over America Alvin meets during his training who offset his unworldliness on the parade ground and in the trenches with their wisdom and ribald humour.
It took twenty years for producer Jesse Lasky to persuade York to permit this biopic and one of his conditions, when he finally agreed, was that only Gary Cooper could play him. Wise man. Cooper’s Private and then Corporal and then Sergeant York is Christ-like. He bears suffering, he radiates courage and he makes sacrifices for humanity (there’s no crucifixion, of course - he goes home from his Golgotha). I’m coming to believe that Gary Cooper is, in some way golden-age Hollywood’s still, calm centre as well as the centre of this movie and all his others. He’s an extraordinary asset to a director and it must have been daunting to see him walking onto the set on day one, knowing this transcendent presence is yours for the duration.
I’d love to have seen an older Cooper take on some thoughtful gangsters or lawyers or jaded reporters in the New Hollywood but he died much too young and I’m not sure he could even have existed in that more cynical world.
Place and speech
The setting is important. At the beginning we’re in deepest Tennessee, in a settlement that’s about as far from this Empire’s metropole as it’s possible to get. Hawks gives us a community that’s frozen in time and space and in this it resembles other humble movie settlements - in Ozu, Renoir, Loach, Ray - where working people carry forward simple ways of life and idioms that put them outside the contingent realm of modernity.
Speech in this movie is important too. The cast is aiming for a meticulously crafted Tennessee accent that’s probably pretty close to how the Presbyterian Scots-Irish settlers of the early 19th Century sounded. When he gets to his first barracks, the other troops take the mickey out of Alvin’s antique usages. If it is authentic it’s because Harry Chandlee was brought onto the project as a writer - he had lived in this part of Tennessee as a young man.
Going to war
Across the ocean, the film’s other big setting is in France, the epicentre of the war the Americans have been watching develop and are now flooding with men and weapons. We’re at the front line in the allies’ massive Meuse-Argonne offensive in the final months of the war. Hawks allows for no doubt about the nobility of the enterprise. Once President Wilson has decided America will join the war, only one of this film’s Americans expresses any doubt at all about serving or about the justice of the war. You might think the first instinct of the male population of a remote rural community like Alvin’s, when asked to travel thousands of miles to kill foreigners from countries you’ve never heard of, might have been to refuse, or at least to object. But these Tennessee men, in other ways so remote from the world’s troubles (it takes days for a newspaper to reach them announcing the hostilities), rush to sign up, at a folding table in the general store - “just as soon as the corn’s in.” Alvin is the only one reluctant to enlist, but not because of isolationism or cowardice or class antagonism. He registers as a conscientious objector because the Bible tells him that killing others is wrong.
But he’s persuaded, by a surprisingly wise and articulate officer, that there might be justice, even virtue, in killing Germans. The officer offers Alvin a crash course in American history and the American constitution. His consciousness is raised and he accepts the liberty of one state to kill the people of another. And once on board with this idea, Alvin couldn’t really have come on side more quickly. In his first encounter with the enemy, his commanding officer is injured and he’s obliged to take up the hopeless cause of defending his out-numbered platoon from a ridge-top nest of 25 German machine-guns.
He silences the whole lot of them, passing through the gun-fire with the insouciance, one might think, flippantly, of a bullet-proof Jesus and then single-handedly killing twenty men and somehow rounding up 132 prisoners, bringing them back to the American trenches as if they’d joined his flock. This feat is so implausibly bold that he and his awe-struck colleagues are required to explain it over and over before it’s accepted by the top brass and the medals start to flow. Sergeant York is suspicious of all the celebration - once back in the USA he’s offered a role in the Ziegfeld Follies, a movie, multiple product endorsements, a radio show. He refuses them all and goes home.
Alvin’s rapid brutalisation, his conversion from peace-loving farmer to trained killing machine, is quick and seems to stand for the necessary brutalisation of a whole nation that must happen when battle is joined and for the way that, across history, working class men and women have been convinced by various aristocracies and ruling classes and capitalists to lay down their concrete lives for abstract and distant causes - the state, the monarchy, the economy, the status quo - switching, at double-time, from worker to fighter, from reserve army to active, fighting army. And then, when required to, and even more quickly, back to worker for the rebuilding.
I watched Sergeant York and Rio Bravo on Amazon Prime Video but they both seem to be on all the streamers. There’s a 4K Blu-Ray of Rio Bravo and Sergeant York is on an ordinary Blu-Ray.
Alvin York’s farm was above a tiny settlement called Pall Mall, Tennessee (yes, it’s named after Pall Mall in St James’s). To this day the population is less than 1,400. Nearby is the bible school that Alvin founded (long abandoned), the Alvin C. York Institute (a school) and the Sgt. Alvin C. York State Historic Park.
David Thomson’s brilliant Biographical Dictionary of Film is over thirty quid on Amazon but if you buy the e-book it’s only a fiver - and then you can CTRL-F your favourite film or actor like a God.
I’m quite certain I recognise a phenomenon from British cinema here: This exceptional cast gives us a mixture of impeccably delivered vernacular and also some more awkward stuff from nicely-spoken actors struggling with the accent. See every RADA-trained Shakesperean struggling with Glasgow or Cockney between about 1930 and the present.
I keep asking myself - from this growing list of filmmaking geniuses, who is the American Jean Renoir? I consider this to be a project (tips in the comment section, please). A lot of people, 45 years after his death, think Renoir is the pivot around which cinema rotates. A humanist of the French Popular Front era, an observer of family, class, man and woman in crisis and in love (a Hollywood film director and a Beverly Hills resident too). A couple of movies back I’d convinced myself Frank Capra was our man. But Capra was a monster and is hereby disqualified. It might be Howard Hawks, though.
Throughout the film, Brits will be distracted by what sounds like the tune to God Save the King. It’s not, it’s the same tune but it’s the American patriotic song My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.
Read this nice history of the Sergeant York project.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.