Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

cuzz-12382 You Americans think you won the war. Yet again you let your ego's get the better of you. Every war you have been in all you do is kill each other. Well done. Keep bragging about how you always came in second....BTW this is the first time I have seen this move in my 50+ years. Tho I will add your on your way to self destruction go figure

disinterested_spectator Audie Murphy was never much of an actor. The only movie he starred in that is worth watching is "To Hell and Back," in which he does a decent job of acting, though one suspects that other actors could have done much better. And yet, the movie just would not have been the same without him.In the book on which this movie was based, Murphy referred to his "thin frame and cursed baby face," which made his commanding officer want to keep him away from the front, giving him light duty, but Murphy kept sneaking off with patrols and scouting parties. Eventually, the company commander gave up and put Murphy back in the front lines. Because our idea of a hero is someone who looks like Rambo, Murphy would never have been cast in this part had the movie been fictional. Even knowing that the movie was based on a true story, the audience might still have been incredulous had a little man with a baby face other than Murphy played the part. Imagine Elisha Cook, Jr. in that role. But by having Murphy play the part himself, we are forced to accept the fact that the kind of actor who plays the hero in a typical movie and the kind of man who is a real hero can be two very different things. And when we reflect on the fact that Murphy was thirty years old when he made the movie, we realize he must have really looked like a baby when he enlisted at the age of seventeen.We all know that movies often diverge from the books they are based on, and so we usually just assess the movie on its own terms. There is one event described in the book, however, that is worth calling attention to, especially since almost no one has read it. Early in the war, when Murphy's company is in Sicily, they come across a couple of Italian officers. Murphy describes the magnificent white horses the Italians mount and on which they ride away. Murphy raises his rifle, fires twice, killing them both. The lieutenant is appalled. He asks Murphy why he did that, saying he should not have shot them. Murphy argues back, telling the lieutenant that that killing the enemy is "our job." Murphy notes that new men are trained to talk tough and act tough, but it takes a while before they accept the fact that they are supposed to "deal out death," and that the lieutenant had not yet accepted that fact.The Italian officers were the first two men Murphy killed, and it is the most unforgettable passage in the book, but there is no mystery why it never made its way into the movie. Generally speaking, we do not like to see our heroes shoot retreating men in the back in cold blood. In most war movies, bullets are flying back and forth, and so it is kill or be killed. But Murphy's life was not in danger when he pulled the trigger. Better still, we like it when something happens that makes the war personal. Later in the movie, in the scene where Murphy charges up a hill and singlehandedly takes out two machine gun nests, what precipitates his heroism is the death of his friend, which makes him angry. But Murphy was not angry when he killed the Italian officers.There is another reason why that event never made it into the movie. There is an unwritten law that in any movie set during World War II, under no circumstances will an American soldier be seen killing Italians, just as there must be no scene of Italian soldiers killing Americans. Granted, the early surrender of the Italians made the occasion for killing or being killed by Italians infrequent, but not so infrequent that the occasion did not occur in Murphy's case. The Italians did not sneak attack us at Pearl Harbor, and the Italians did not run camps like Auschwitz. They were a pipsqueak nation that never had much of a chance to do anything to us, and so we suppress combat scenes between American and Italian soldiers.Along these lines, in the typical combat movie made during World War II, there is the obligatory ethnic diversity: an Anglo-Saxon officer, a Mexican, a Pole, an Irishman, an American Indian, and always an Italian. We never see German-Americans or Japanese-Americans as part of the mix. Though a lot of Japanese-Americans were sent to concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as relocation centers, some still did serve in the American armed forces. But we don't see them so much in the movies (though reference is made to one having done so in "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)). But no combat movie is complete without an Italian as part of the company, America's way of saying that the Italians were really not evil, they just got tricked by Mussolini.Even if there is a remake of this movie, I doubt that Murphy's killing the Italian officers would be depicted in it either. In fact, such a remake would undoubtedly have a scene showing Murphy suffering from PTSD after the war was over (regardless of whether that was true or not). In the 1950s, we were perfectly comfortable with the idea that soldiers fought World War II with a clean conscience. Today, that might disturb us, especially after seeing him kill in cold blood.

Robert J. Maxwell In the early 50s, Audie Murphy and his ghost writer published a book of Murphy's unbelievable exploits in Italy, France, and Germany during World War II. Murphy, still in his teens, won about every decoration for valor that the human mind can dream up -- and he earned them too. The experience wrecked him. He made movies later in his life, always boyish looking and modest sounding. But he suffered from PTSD. He was tormented by nightmares of firing an M-1 at attacking Germans and having his rifle fall apart, piece by piece. He slept with a Colt pistol under his pillow and attacked another man with a baseball bat. His many medals were stashed in disarray in a drawer. He died in a plane crash.Hollywood has taken this man's remarkable story, lifting pieces of it from his memoirs, left out the most poignant passages and twisted Murphy's remaining heroics into pablum. An example of what I mean. In the book, written in the present tense, Murphy describes his first encounter with the enemy and sees one of his targets fall. "Now I have killed," he writes, and goes on to explain his emotions.No room for any such ruminations in the movie. We see Murphy rejected by the other services for being too young or too short. In the Third Infantry Division he is ridiculed in a good-natured way by the usual stereotypes from other war movies -- the guy who brags about his sexual exploits, the stoic Indian, the ambitious Pole, the reckless good friend. The musical score suits the film: a high school marching band plays "On Wisconsin" or something.Murphy's achievements provide a peg to hang a formulaic war movie on. No cliché is avoided. On leave at last with his fellow troopers in Rome, they all head off to get drunk and get laid, leaving the bashful hero behind. The shy Murphy winds up spending the night with an accommodating young woman while the others are either satisfied with finding someone to talk to or find themselves in some other sort of dead end. The next morning all the men brag about their conquests while the reticent Murphy says nothing about his night of romance.The battle scenes are pretty good, though again they fit the Hollywood mold. The writers even are forced -- get this -- they are forced to downplay or skip over Murphy's boldest actions -- because they are UNBELIEVABLE. The guy's military achievements are so extravagant that the writers must have figured no one would believe them, although to be sure, what's left in is heroic enough.It isn't a bad movie, or rather it wouldn't be if it were fictional from beginning to end. It would just be a standard genre effort from the 1950s, inferior to, say, "Battleground" or "The Story of G. I. Joe." But it pretends to be a true story and it is simply not.What a tragic waste -- of the rest of what life remained to Murphy, and of an historically accurate narrative that was never told.

alexandre michel liberman (tmwest) When I was at school in my early teens, never a film was so much talked about after a weekend. The guys loved it, and one scene when they give chocolate bars to the soldiers, stuck to one's mind and one's appetite. I saw this film on DVD yesterday and either the chocolate scene was missing or unconsciously I slept through it. There is not much of a plot to the film, because it shows the real hero Audie Murphy in combat. But what great action scenes! The soldiers capturing a house in the field and then losing it, Murphy blowing a tank, shooting by mistake at himself in the mirror, standing on a tank in flames, throwing grenades at a pillbox, crossing a river under fire, whatever you think it is there, and in Cinemascope, which adapts very well to the widescreen format. We are used to see actors playing heroes, but here we see a hero which played western characters that could never be as brave as he was in real life. Everybody would think it is unreal!!!