Search - What Price Glory? on DVD

Uneven Cagney/Ford collaboration

Steven Hellerstedt | 11/06/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I've watched the first five minutes of this movie three times, and I love it. It's 1918 and a straggling company of mud-splattered American Marines are marching through a bleak, barren and blasted landscape, led by Captain Jimmy Cagney. They approach a small French village. One of the men fall out of line to drink a dipper of water. A tall, neat and clean Marine barks "What company is this?" The weary marine treats him with disdain and answers with sarcasm. The barking soldier, top soldier Dan Dailey, is here as a replacement, with green recruit Robert Wagner in tow. Learning who commands the company Dailey tells Wagner they'll wait until the last minute before joining the company - there's obviously some bad blood between Dailey and Cagney. The men continue marching, nearing the village. We see the pretty - heck, gorgeous - inn-keeper's daughter Corrine Calvet race through the deserted streets of the village to get a place to watch the arriving American troops. A company of nattily dressed French soldiers, with band, stand at attention and the band begins to play a rousing march. Cut to a wide shot of the marching marines. Capt. Cagney picks up his head when he hears the music, his body straightens. Fifty feet from the bridge that separates his men from the welcoming French troop Cagney barks an order and the straggley men fall into line and, well, look sharp. The men pass in review - `Eyes... Right!' - and fall out. The film cuts to a young lieutenant who is glaring at Cagney, his face a study in passionate hatred.

This is the way any and every movie should start. In five short minutes, including the time it takes to run the opening titles in the middle of the sequence, we're introduced to the two major characters, Cagney and Dailey, learn they don't like each other, and, with the insertion of the balefully staring lieutenant, guess Cagney is disliked by more than a few of his men. We're even introduced to the soft leg of the movie's romantic triangle with the insertion of the Calvet character. We meet rookie Robert Wagner, the lead player in the movie's romantic subplot. The troops' march into the village is well-conceived, well-cut, and moving. Before I had a chance to settle down I was emotionally invested in this movie.

Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there. Cagney and Dailey, it turns out, have fought together from Antwerp to Zanzibar, both as brothers-in-arms and romantic rivals. They'll spend most of this movie bickering over Calvet. The rivalry is meant to be of the fast paced, screwball variety, but it's too convoluted and contrived - not to mention incredible - to care much about. The film is taken from the Maxwell Anderson stage-play, and for a motion picture it feels strangely stage bound. In movies the camera follows characters, on the stage the actors walk onto a set. An awful lot of the stuff going on here takes place in Cagney's office, or in the inn's bar, or in a field headquarters. And furthermore we're never really introduced to that angry young lieutenant from the first scene, never learn why he hates Cagney so intensely, never learn why WE should have negative feelings about Cagney who seems like a standard issue `love-em-and-leave-em' soldier who'd fallen under the spell of pretty young Calvet. If that angry young lieutenant doesn't get a chance to explain himself he does get to speak the lines in which the play's title is embedded. Cagney's men, rested and brought back up to strength with green recruits - Robert Wagner and others - are back at the front line. They're ordered to capture a German officer for interrogation purposes. Cagney sends out some of the green troops, who don't return. Lieutenant Angry, desperately wounded, writhes on his field sick bed and dares Cagney to capture that German officer himself. It's wordier than that, and a whole lot more serious than the movie prepares us for, and, most importantly, the Lieutenant's rant contains the title of the movie. Heck, we just know Cagney as an aging Lothario, not a mean/vicious/vainglorious/what-have-you commander, and having an overwrought bit player hurl a mouthful of Maxwell Anderson epithets at him is a little much. What price glory, indeed.

What the heck. Reputable sources have it that Ford intended to turn what, I assume, is a Maxwell Anderson anti-war play into a musical. That may not have been such a bad idea. Calvet does sing to the boys in the bar a couple of times, and Wagner gets serenaded by a French girl in a blue beret. The action sequences are bad, the `what price glory' scene is a dud, and generally this one works better when it plays it for comedy rather than drama. WHAT PRICE GLORY isn't an awful movie, especially for those of us who are fans of Cagney and Ford, but it is awfully uneven and static.
"

Sad and funny

Peter Ingemi | Worcester County, Massachusetts United States | 11/05/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The story of a tough Captain and a tough top Sgt in France in 1918 who can't stand each other but both need to get a green batch of marines ready to fight with the hard fighting, hard drinking and hard joking vets of company L.There are a lot of sub plots here from a young Robert Wagner to a Young Harry Morgan as another Sgt to the rivalry between our two leads for the innkeeper?s daughter.There isn't much war in this war picture but what there are hits you in the gut, the vets are hard fighters but don't love it and know the score.Cagney says it best late in the movie "it was ok when you had a bunch of guys who know what they're doing but not when you've got a bunch of kids."They know it stinks but they do their job.Another winner from John Ford."