The Send in the Marines Blogathon – What Price Glory (1952)

This is my first of 4 submissions for the The Send in the Marines Blogathon being run by J-Dub over at Dubism and Gill of RealWeegieMidget

Tnx for letting me take part!

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“It’s a lousy war, kid… but it’s the only one we’ve got.” – Captain Flagg

Number of Times Seen – 1 (6 Nov 2019)

Brief Synopsis – A Marine company commander during World War I must deal with his own personal issues while trying to keep his men alive.

My Take on it – This is a film that I’ve been interested in seeing for a while yet never had the opportunity to get around to it.

With this blogathon, I figured that it was the perfect opportunity to finally do so.

The premise of the film is an interesting one, but even in the hands of the great Director John Ford, this film just isn’t presented well enough.

James Cagney was a great actor, but this film give shim an opportunity to over play this character and things come across in a very erratic fashion which hinders more than helps things.

The biggest problem with this film is that is constantly waivers between being a drama and a comedy and fails to anchor itself as one or the other which also hurts things because it’s difficult to take the story as serious as it should be.

This film also spends too much time dealing the the rivalry between the characters and fails to develop any of them more than superficially which makes it so much more difficult to care about them or about what they do which is quite a shame.

Bottom Line – Interesting idea that unfortunately doesn’t work as well as one might hope.  Cagney is a bit too erratic in the lead role and the film has too much trouble trying to decide whether it wants to be a drama or a comedy.  The story spends too much time trying to focus on the rivalry between the characters instead of developing them in a more thorough and succinct way that will make us care more about them and all that they do.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – Jack Pennick was an acknowledged military expert. Highly likely that he was a technical expert on this movie even though he never received credit for being so. While filming a movie at West Point, he pointed out that a display of crossed swords were hung upside down. They had been incorrectly displayed for many years. (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy (5/10)

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