TO HELL AND BACK Movie Review

1955 Jesse Hibbs

Audie Murphy's screen autobiography is a much better film than it has any right to be. It's dated and imperfect, but, more importantly, it is not celluloid hero-worship. The figure who emerges may be a bit too flawless, but he's not boastful and he doesn't set himself apart from his fellow dogfaces. Actually, the central theme of the film is that the Army provides a Depression-era kid from East Texas with a strong family structure that he has never really experienced.

In 1937, a young Audie Murphy (played by Gordon Gebert as a boy, by Murphy himself later) is forced to become the head of a family with an ailing mother and an absent father. He drops out of grade school and goes to work full time to provide for his brothers and sisters until, at roughly the same time, World War II starts and his mother dies. By joining up, he can provide more money for his siblings, but neither the Navy nor the Marines are interested in the small guy. In the Army, he is promoted to Acting Sergeant on the troop ship carrying him to French North Africa and the 3rd Infantry Division, B Company, 15th Regiment. It soon becomes apparent that the babyfaced kid has a genuine aptitude for soldiering.

After Africa, his outfit takes part in the invasions of Sicily, Anzio and Southern France. In every engagement, Murphy steps up and does whatever he can. At the same time, he becomes friends with Brandon (Charles Drake), Johnson (Marshall Thompson), and Kerrigan (Jack Kelly). They're the core of his platoon, and Murphy's various heroics never take place in a vacuum. He sees himself as part of a unit, and everything that he does is meant to advance the unit, not the individual. The one long scene that moves away from the military—an interlude in an Italian town where he meets Maria (Susan Kohner) and her family—is embarrassingly bad. As long as the focus stays on the platoon's activities on the battlefield, the film is in fine shape. By today's standards, the depiction of combat may seem a bit sanitized, but director Jesse Hibbs makes the cold mud and rain of the Italian campaign believably real, especially a series of scenes revolving around a farmhouse and a tank.

It's difficult to criticize someone who is playing himself, but Murphy is not the most expressive or commanding presence ever to grace the screen. In the quiet moments, he is only slightly more comfortable-looking than he is in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage, though he does appear to be at ease in the action scenes. Throughout, he comes across as a likeable young man, with the emphasis on young. All of the events recounted in the film took place before Murphy was 19 years old. In that brief military career, America's most decorated soldier won more than 20 medals, including the Congressional Medal of Honor and the French Croix de Guerre, and killed more than 240 enemy soldiers.

Such an active campaign makes for a story that would be dismissed as screenwriter's fantasy if it weren't true.

Cast: Audie Murphy (Audie Murphy), Marshall Thompson (Johnson), Jack Kelly (Kerrigan), Charles Drake (Brandon), Gregg Palmer (Lt. Manning), Paul Picerni (Valentino), David Janssen (Lt. Lee), Bruce Cowling (Capt. Marks), Paul Langton (Col. Howe), Art Aragon (Sanchez), Felix Noriego (Swope), Denver Pyle (Thompson), Brett Halsey (Saunders), Susan Kohner (Maria), Anabel Shaw (Helen), Mary Field (Mrs. Murphy), Gordon Gebert (Audie as a boy), Rand Brooks (Lt. Harris), Richard Castle (Kovak), Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (Himself); Written by: Gil Doud; Cinematography by: Maury Gertsman; Music by: Henry Mancini. Producer: Aaron Rosenberg, Universal. Running Time: 106 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta.