Audie Murphy is said to have suffered quite badly from combat fatigue (post-traumatic stress disorder) for most of his life due to all that "excitement" from his wartime "adventures". So it's a bit of a shame seeing his life story reduced here to a series of war movie clichés.
First, there's the recruitment poster phraseology. Then there's the "high-spirited" squad with the diverse ethnic composition, including the voluble (natch) Italian who ... wait for it ... really loves spaghetti. Then there's those Germans who can't shoot straight which explains why the war ran for such a short time.
The spotless Hollywood backlot version of Naples is good for a laugh. This would be the same Naples where the real-life population was deloused with DDT. Just imagine what the Audie character would have sounded like if he'd been portrayed by the usual Hollywood B-movie Texan -- "Let's lasso up some Jerries" -- instead of by a real one.
This movie has one big plus and that's "Murph" himself. It's not often you have a movie where the quiet, unassuming, sickly short man is the hero, but this would be that movie. So while all the movie star types are getting what passes here for "bright" dialogue, Murphy is mostly keeping his mouth shut and unassumingly saving the day.
And that's the way it really was.
Audie's sweet Napoletana, Maria, is played by Susan Kohner. She was the sexy but whiny black (!) girl who could pass for white, in Douglas Sirk's poorly directed women's picture "Imitation of Life" (1959) with Lana Turner. Kohner would be the sole reason a high-testosterone viewer of "To Hell and Back" would be found sitting through that low-testosterone tearjerker which also stars Sandra Dee, definitely a girl midget although not a certifiable Gidget (also 1959).
Walter Bedell Smith provides the introduction for "To Hell and Back". The reason that Gen. Eisenhower was able to come through World War II seeming like Mr. Nice Guy was that he had Smith, the pitbull general, as his right-hand man. They played a real-life version of good cop / bad cop. You can easily see here that Smith is not the sort of person you would want to meet some night down a dark hedgerow.
First, there's the recruitment poster phraseology. Then there's the "high-spirited" squad with the diverse ethnic composition, including the voluble (natch) Italian who ... wait for it ... really loves spaghetti. Then there's those Germans who can't shoot straight which explains why the war ran for such a short time.
The spotless Hollywood backlot version of Naples is good for a laugh. This would be the same Naples where the real-life population was deloused with DDT. Just imagine what the Audie character would have sounded like if he'd been portrayed by the usual Hollywood B-movie Texan -- "Let's lasso up some Jerries" -- instead of by a real one.
This movie has one big plus and that's "Murph" himself. It's not often you have a movie where the quiet, unassuming, sickly short man is the hero, but this would be that movie. So while all the movie star types are getting what passes here for "bright" dialogue, Murphy is mostly keeping his mouth shut and unassumingly saving the day.
And that's the way it really was.
Audie's sweet Napoletana, Maria, is played by Susan Kohner. She was the sexy but whiny black (!) girl who could pass for white, in Douglas Sirk's poorly directed women's picture "Imitation of Life" (1959) with Lana Turner. Kohner would be the sole reason a high-testosterone viewer of "To Hell and Back" would be found sitting through that low-testosterone tearjerker which also stars Sandra Dee, definitely a girl midget although not a certifiable Gidget (also 1959).
Walter Bedell Smith provides the introduction for "To Hell and Back". The reason that Gen. Eisenhower was able to come through World War II seeming like Mr. Nice Guy was that he had Smith, the pitbull general, as his right-hand man. They played a real-life version of good cop / bad cop. You can easily see here that Smith is not the sort of person you would want to meet some night down a dark hedgerow.