And I wrote this several weeks ago on facebook:
"Stumbled across a wonderful film, Sergeant York (1941, Howard Hawks) on youtube channel Old Films Revival Project. Great, great movie. In fact, while I had watched countless old westerns on TV and Golden Age classics like Gone With the Wind (in bits and pieces) and The Wizard of Oz, I don't know how many times as a young child, it wasn't really until I was in eighth grade and watched Sergeant York on AMC or TCM (through Dish Network back then) that I really, REALLY paid close attention to the old style of filmmaking and storytelling in the classic studio system heyday of films. Really began to notice, to think about, and dissect in my mind how older films were very different from modern pictures in terms of storytelling, tone, and style.
Howard Hawks, the greatest filmmaker of all time, tells the real story of Alvin York - a World War I hero from the rural hills of Tennessee who infamously captured, near single-handedly with just a handful of men, over a hundred German soldiers and two dozen machine gun nests during the chaos and Hell of WWI trench warfare.
I'll post the link to the film here. It's a delightful film and released just on the eve of World War II, it's one of the "big three" American pro European intervention non-appeasement films that Hollywood released at the start of the 1940s acting as allegorical morality plays to rally up the nation to get behind the war efforts in Europe at a time where isolationism vs interventionalism was still (and really today the debate still goes on) a hot area of contention. The other two big ones being of course Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Casablanca (1942) and each of the three films works perfectly as a form of pro-war, rah-rah America propaganda. That's not a bad thing. Propaganda is a word that while it certainly does have a negative connotation - well earned to a degree, in and of itself at face value is not an inherently malevolent thing - no more than say the Tooth Fairy is for getting young kids to brush their teeth or Santa Claus is to illicit good behavior... anyway... but that's a different discussion altogether.
The truth is Sergeant York is emblematic of the old style of filmmaking which is VERY dialogue heavy, VERY character heavy, and VERY allegorical and literary heavy in terms of storytelling. Sure the great visuals are there, including some great deep focus photography, but the visuals tend not to overwhelm the story... certainly they don't draw too much attention to themselves as is common in most Howard Hawks' films. Also a great score by Max Steiner (Now, Voyager, Gone With the Wind, The Searchers) with solid melodies and motifs. Moreover, while technically a "war film" the first half of the movie is anything but and like most great Hawks' pictures it really transcends genres. To me, it works first and foremost as a comedy with some truly absurdist and hilarious moments such as church sermon being interrupted by a raucous and rowdy bout of horseplay with gunfire, a bar divided by state lines in which one side alcohol is prohibited, where five steps over it's a free for all, a murder attempt thwarted by lightning, a bar fight being stopped by "mom's callin'" using turkey hunting as war strategy, and the idea of wanting to be crammed into a subway as reward for being a war hero.
While I've never been a fan of Gary Cooper and his dry, dull, and drool deadpan "aww chucks" low-energy demeanor and style of dialogue delivery, it absolutely works perfectly for the character and plays well off of the real star and glue of the film which is Walter Brennan as the preacher.
Great stuff and Sergeant York along with some of the other films I mentioned is a great entryway into older cinema of a by-gone era. Also as a side note, really - REALLY cool to see L'avventura by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni on the same youtube channel (Old Films Revival Project) too. As a complete opposite and different type of filmmaker than Howard Hawks, his (Antonioni) stuff is really equally as great and certainly is in my top 10 filmmakers of all time as well."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PtuM7M...mmlYs0M9NJLnZo