To Hell and Back

During the June TCM spotlight on World War II movies, they ran To Hell and Back, which I had seen once quite a few years back but hadn't blogged about. So I put it on the DVR to watch and do a full-length post on now.

It's fairly well known that Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in World War II, and the fame garnered from all of this is one of the things that resulted in his becoming an actor. He wrote an autobiography of his experiences in the war, titled To Hell and Back, and that was later turned into the movie we see here, with Murphy playing himself.

He isn't playing himself at first since the movie begins when Murphy is 12 years old, the eldest son in a family of sharecroppers in east Texas with only a single mother, Dad having abandoned them. Young Audie realizes that the only way the family is going to survive is if he drops out of school to get a full-time job, which Mom ultimately lets him do with great reluctance.

Fast forward a couple of years to December, 1941. As you can guess from the date, Audie is about to be affected by the US entry into World War II. First he sees his boss' son realize he's going to be called back into service. As for Audie, he isn't going to be serving just yet, since he's underage. (I've seen his date of birth listed as 1924, 1925, and 1926, but in any of these cases he wouldn't have been 18 yet.) That, and he's helping take care of Mom, who dies in fairly short order. (Wikipedia suggests she died before the US entered the war.)

With Mom dead and the younger kids sent to an orphanage, Audie decides he's going to enlist, but none of the services want him because he's too small and too young. But eventually he is accepted by the Army and sent to the North African theater. The US Army marches on, eventually kicking the Nazis out of Africa and enabling the invasion of Sicily. It's here the Murphy really starts learning about the horrors of war, as the Germans are better dug in. Murphy begins to lose his friends and learn that you really shouldn't make friends in the military since they're going to die. But he also starts getting field promotions.

Murphy's plan at the time, at least as implied in the movie, was to make a career for himself in the military. Having dropped out of school, he wasn't a suitable officer candidate, but he was taking all the extra courses the Army offered and sending as much money as he could back to his siblings, both of which earn the notice of his superiors, as does his unexpected heroism, everybody having felt he was too small and mentally weak to be a truly good soldier.

The Americans continue to advance fitfully, facing fierce resistance from the Axis powers first in southern Italy, then in southern France and finally in Alsace. It was in Alsace that Murphy would earn his Medal of Honor, standing atop a burning tank and single-handedly stopping an advance of German soldiers. But he also suffers an injury that would prevent him from staying in the military after the war.

To Hell and Back is about as well-made as you can expect a military movie from the mid-1950s to be. Washington state substitutes for Italy and France, with Universal's soundstages being used for the interiors. However, there's also a fair amount of stock footage from World War II interspersed. Since the movie is in wide-screen with Cinemascope having been introduced two years earlier, and the World War II footage is all originally in roughly 4:3 and cropped for this movie, the difference between the two sets of footage is quite noticeable.

Audie Murphy disliked this movie in part because he thought it really sanitized his experiences, but to be fair to the filmmakers, there probably isn't any way to show the true horrors of war without being able to film an actual war and the concomitant death and destruction. And even if it had been, audiences of the time probably wouldn't have wanted to see it. Still, Murphy's thoughts are understandable. As for his performance, he does a reasonably good job one the action shifts to Europe; the American scenes of Murphy's juvenile life are maudlin and something a lot of actors wouldn't be able to rise above.

All in all, To Hell and Back is a worthy movie in the World War II cycle. It's available on DVD in multiple releases should you wish to watch it.