Sergeant York (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The genuinely great film I watched immediately afterwards was Sergeant York, the 1941 biopic of real-life World War I hero Alvin C. York (Gary Cooper), born in the mountain village of Pall Mall, Tennessee on December 13, 1887. The real Alvin York was whipsawed during his early life between a reverence for God and religion and a desire to get drunk and raise hell, though in the movie (written by a committee – Abem Finkel, Paul Muni’s brother-in-law, and Harry Chandlee did the first draft and Howard Koch and John Huston came in later for a rewrite, with help from an uncredited Sam Cowan – and stunningly directed by Howard Hawks as his first film under a Warner Bros. contract that allowed him more or less to be his own producer) he spends a lot of time trying to raise the money to buy a parcel of bottom land (much easier to farm than the rocky top land the Yorks have owned for generations). York enters a shooting contest to make the final payment, only on the big day he learns that the land’s owner has reneged and sold the parcel to Zeb Andrews (Rob Porterfield), York’s rival for the hand of Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie). York is so angry that he’s lost out on the land that he sets out on his horse to track down and kill the landowner, but midway through his ride a few convenient bolts of lightning rain down from the sky. They knock him to the ground and bend his rifle, making it unusable. York takes this as a sign from God to repent his evil ways, so he becomes born again and starts studying the Bible with Rosier Pile (Walter Brennan, second-billed and giving the second most restrained performance of his career, next to the professor he’d play in Frltz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! two years later), the local general-store owner and part-time minister. (For some reason, all his church services – or at least the two we actually get to see – seem to take place at night, maybe because he has to wait for the store to close.)

Unfortunately, the newly converted York has only been around for a few months when President Woodrow Wilson gets the U.S. Congress to declare war against Germany, and a rather perplexed York finds himself confronted with the legal requirement to register for the draft. Pastor Pile helps York write a letter requesting conscientious objector status, but his application is rejected because he’s not a member of an established religious denomination with a pacifist tradition. In a revelation scene, York hikes into the mountains and sits on a papîer-maché crag and recalls the Bible verse, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That decides him and he determines not only to go into the Army but to fight as best he can. In rifle training – where he’s predictably impressed by the high quality of the military rifle he’s issued – he racks up an impressive record as a sharpshooter (of course we already knew he could shoot from his antics back home, including shooting his initials into a tree that had been previously marked as the site where Daniel Boone had killed a bear in 1760, as well as his victory in the shooting contest). He’s shipped off via an intertitle to France, where he and his unit are sent to the front immediately and put into combat alongside battle-hardened British troops who give York tips on how to survive in the trenches and when to duck when they hear a shell coming in overhead. The film reaches its climax on October 8, 1918 – five weeks before the Armistice – when an Allied offensive is being stymied by a German machine-gun nest alongside a railroad the Allies are trying to secure. York takes command of his unit when its previous head falls victim to one of the German machine guns, and with a combination of rifle and pistol shots manages to kill enough of the German soldiers and goad the rest to surrender to neutralize the threat. Then he has the bothersome necessity of trying to find an Allied authority to whom he can turn over the captured prisoners. York gets fêted by various Allied governments, including Britain’s, France’s and his own. When he returns home he’s presented with a 200-acre bottom land farm, a complete house already built on it to his specifications, and the promise that the Governor of Tennessee will come down to his county and personally conduct the ceremony marrying him and Gracie.

The real Alvin Cullum York was a fascinating figure who seemed little interested in money or fame; what turned him on as a war hero was leveraging his status for causes greater than himself, including improving educational opportunities for rural Tennesseans. York had previously turned down offers from Hollywood studios to make a movie about him, but in 1941 Warner Bros. came a-calling at a time when York badly needed money to endow a Bible college he wanted to set up. York drove a hard bargain when it came to the contract, including demanding the right of approval over the actor who would play him – and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor he would approve. That posed a problem for Warner because Cooper was then under contract to Sam Goldwyn, and in order to get Cooper for Sergeant York he had to loan out his biggest star, Bette Davis, to Goldwyn to star in the film of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz and the Wikipedia pages on York (both his real life and the film) claimed it was the highest-grossing American movie made in 1941, though elsewhere I’ve read that was the Abbott and Costello vehicle Buck Privates. Sergeant York was premiered in New York City on July 2, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into World War II, though the film was inevitably seen through the lens of the political conflict of the period. The interventionists (including York himself, who made a speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in May 1941 in which he said, “We are standing at the crossroads of history. The important capitals of the world in a few years will either be Berlin and Moscow, or Washington and London. I, for one, prefer Congress and Parliament to Hitler's Reichstag and Stalin's Kremlin”) hailed the film and the isolationists predictably denounced it.

The film was immensely popular and won Gary Cooper the Academy Award for Best Actor. Though the cornpone dialogue and affected accents get a bit trying at times, Cooper delivers a performance of subtle strength and nuance; though it’s within the established bounds of his screen personality (in a wartime radio show Cooper kidded himself when he was asked, “Don’t you ever say anything but ‘Yup’?,” and he answered, “Nope”), he’s able with just subtle changes in his facial expressions and his voice and posture to suggest the hellion he is in act one, the devoted believer in act two and the reluctant war hero of act three. Sergeant York runs 134 minutes, unusually long for a 1941 film – especially a black-and-white period piece with just one major star – and though only the last third of the film contains the sort of slam-bang action Howard Hawks was famous for (and Joan Leslie’s part was a typical movie heroine of the period and didn’t give Hawks the chance to play the proto-feminist games he’d already done with Barbara Stanwyck and would do again with Lauren Bacall), it’s quite effectively directed. The writing is a bit more problematic; much of the film’s first half contains scenes of rural life, including a town dance and a fight at the local bar, that seem to be in there as much to tick off a checklist of rural Hollywood clichés than to advance the story. But overall Sergeant York is a work of real sophistication and charm, and I especially liked the character of “Pusher” Ross (George Tobias), a former New York subway conductor whom York meets in the army and tries to explain to the hayseed York just what a subway is and how it functions. We genuinely like “Pusher” and find ourselves rooting for him and hoping he’ll survive the war – so we’re heartbroken when [spoiler alert!] he turns up dead in the final sequence, courtesy of a German officer who threw a hand grenade as he was supposedly surrendering.

Sergeant York is also a vivid collection of picturesquely staged scenes, including an early shot of York actually farming and shot through such heavy-duty red filters, I joked to my husband Charles (who, like me, had never seen the movie before, and who had got back from work about 20 minutes in), “Ah! Socialist realism!” Hawks and his production crew used two directors of photography, Sol Polito for most of the movie and Arthur Edeson for the war scenes (and I suspect they got Edeson because he’d already shot the 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and therefore had experience reproducing World War I on film), and though there are some pretty obvious painted backdrops and model shots, for the most part the film is visually convincing. Above all there’s the quiet dignity and strength of Gary Cooper’s performance; though the film might have had a bit more “edge” with a different sort of actor (like Bogart, maybe?), Cooper is so “right” for the role on his own terms it’s easy to see why Alvin York was so dead set that Cooper was the only actor whom he would allow in the role.