Story of G.I. Joe (1945) on Netflix
Approved19451h 48mBiographyDramaWar
Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent, joins C Company, 18th Infantry, as its untested soldiers board trucks for their first trip to the front. Lieutenant Bill Walker lets him come along.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.1/104,399 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
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Plot summary
C Company of the 18th Infantry is going into combat for the first time in North Africa, and Ernie Pyle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent, travels with the outfit. The soldiers have not yet been under fire, and neither has he. Lieutenant Bill Walker, their commander, allows him to accompany the men, and Pyle follows them through rain and mud to the front lines. He gets to know privates Dondaro, Mew and Murphy and Sergeant Warnicki, and finds in their daily lives the human interest material his readers back home want. Their first battle comes at Kasserine Pass, where the Americans are defeated, and while the fighting goes on Pyle is at the battalion command post when Walker comes in as a runner for the company commander.
Cast
- John R. Reillyas Private Murphy(Jack Reilly)
- Yolanda Laccaas Amelia, Italian Girl(uncredited)
- Tito Renaldoas Lopez(uncredited)
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ernie Pyle never saw the finished film: The Story of G.I. Joe premiered two months to the day after the correspondent was killed in action on Ie Shima during the invasion of Okinawa.
- Wellman got 150 soldiers as extras, all veterans of the Italian campaign then training in California for the Pacific, during six weeks of filming in late 1944; the War Department let them grow beards and Wellman insisted the real soldiers speak much of the dialogue for authenticity.
- Burgess Meredith was serving as an Army captain and the Army refused to release him for the lead role of Ernie Pyle; according to Meredith, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins overruled it and General George C. Marshall personally approved his honorable discharge.
- Mitchum's Captain Bill Walker was modeled on Captain Henry T. Waskow of the 36th Division's Company B, 143rd Infantry, whose death in combat on December 14, 1943, was the subject of Ernie Pyle's most famous column.
- When William Wellman took convincing, producer Lester Cowan asked Ernie Pyle to approach him; Pyle invited Wellman to his home and persuaded him to accept the director's job.
- Before filming, Meredith spent time with the real Ernie Pyle, who was in New Mexico recuperating from the emotional effects of surviving an accidental bombing by the Army Air Forces at the start of Operation Cobra in Normandy.
- The screenwriters put Pyle's story with the 18th Infantry Regiment, but his own favorite outfit was the 133rd Infantry Regiment of the 34th Infantry Division, which he had covered in 1942 in Northern Ireland and later in Tunisia.
