I had the impression that Universal pushed this out in Australia before anywhere else. They had no printing on it and I hadn't heard of the film when it hit the city grind house. The people I saw it with were gobsmacked.
As JOURNEY TO SHILOH rolled on, we kept on seeing things that we hadn't encountered in the thousands of westerns we'd seen run through this system - the gamblers with identical pistols under the table, pointed at the kid, the Southern blacks urging the Confederate troops on and the way the plot gets stuck into fatuity of gung ho youngsters rushing into the military. It took a long while to get from here to BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY.
It also ran to some nice pieces of dialogue - the saloon hoons telling the kids they should have scraped the meat off their leather jackets.
I thought William Hale was going to be a major player, saw his shorts GRAND CENTRAL MARKET and THE TOWERS and contacted him, learning that the dodgy stock footage was forced on the production by the producer, who Hale thought wanted to impose bogus scale on it.
The bonus is that all those faceless juveniles turned into movie stars and one of them stayed one.
This one surfaced the same time as Wadja's POPIOLI/ ASHES, which also deals with young men going to war. Hale's film was not outclassed.
As JOURNEY TO SHILOH rolled on, we kept on seeing things that we hadn't encountered in the thousands of westerns we'd seen run through this system - the gamblers with identical pistols under the table, pointed at the kid, the Southern blacks urging the Confederate troops on and the way the plot gets stuck into fatuity of gung ho youngsters rushing into the military. It took a long while to get from here to BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY.
It also ran to some nice pieces of dialogue - the saloon hoons telling the kids they should have scraped the meat off their leather jackets.
I thought William Hale was going to be a major player, saw his shorts GRAND CENTRAL MARKET and THE TOWERS and contacted him, learning that the dodgy stock footage was forced on the production by the producer, who Hale thought wanted to impose bogus scale on it.
The bonus is that all those faceless juveniles turned into movie stars and one of them stayed one.
This one surfaced the same time as Wadja's POPIOLI/ ASHES, which also deals with young men going to war. Hale's film was not outclassed.