Movie review - "To Hell and Back" (1955) ***

A big screen Hollywood version of Audie Murphy's war career - rather a censored version version of his memoirs that apparently were censored enough in the first place. Despite CinemaScope and a big budget the film has some of that awful crappiness of other Universal war films -particularly the painful "jokey" by play amongst Murphy's fellow soldiers (who just seem like a bunch of non-descript actors in uniform -I only recognised David Janssen - at the end of the film when we see their "ghosts" you feel nothing because it's hard to remember who they were). Much of the movie is done in that sort of tentative "military movie" way that you sometimes saw in films about people who were still alive (eg PT109) - lunky comic relief, narration, marching band soundtrack, exposition from superior officers: "they say this man did X", "he's a great soldier".

But the film is redeemed by several things -the fact Murphy is playing himself - you find yourself amazed when you see him running around machine gunning Germans and fighting tanks and oncoming army single handedly thinking to yourself "this actually happened"; there's also Murphy's presence - the fact he is so young and baby faced, whereas most war films usually have some rugged John Wayne-type doing the heroics, but you can see glimpses of his greatness as a soldier in the action sequences: he darts around with lightning speed, his face grits with ferocious determination - he is particularly effective (and believable) when he yells, like when he screams at a mate who's got himself shot, or when he talks to people on the radio about the tanks "how far away are they?" "Hang on and you can ask them yourself!" (a great moment); finally, there are the combat sequences which are extremely well done - they seem more realistic, as if Murphy made sure these at least were accurate. All these things make it a superior war film. Apart from that there is a chaste interlude with an Italian girl (you can read between the lines in this scene to have more of an idea of what really happened) and glimpses of Murphy's poor upbringing in Texas (NB his accent sounds just like Matthew McConaghey's).