Anzio

Anzio

In both “Anzio” and “The Green Berets,” a journalist covering the war is driven to pick up a gun and fight as a soldier; this act of choosing is what both movies are about. But they are very different, and something that seems stupid in one is wise in the other.

The correspondent in “Berets” works for a paper that opposes the Vietnam war. He’s an incredibly naive man (played by David Janssen) who doesn’t know anything and speaks only in clichés (presumably so he can communicate with the other dimwit characters, who seem to have wandered over from comic books).

He slams his portable typewriter down on a table as if there were another one where it came from, feeds John Wayne the anti-war line from old Wayne Morse speeches, has seen all the wrong movies and goes home with all the wrong girls. But after seeing a medic treat the foot of a little Vietnamese girl, he sees through it all, turns in his typewriter (probably busted anyway) and enlists as a private. Housefathers.

This kind of sophomoric bugle-tooting comes as quite a relief after the movie’s opening scenes which establish it beyond doubt as one of the most inept war movies ever made. It’s half-baked artistically but fully baked politically; if nothing else, it serves to reveal publicly every anti-war argument advanced since 1964 by those members of my generation still existing at large within shouting distance of Columbia University.

All these arguments are mouthed for us by Mitchum’s young girl friend (“Tommy Kirk has joined up”) while she brings him coffee because he stayed up too late last night doing his homework for Sgt. Shriver’s War on Poverty Task Force; by Mitchum himself while he explains why he covered seven previous wars (“You see I just don’t understand why men have to kill each other”); and by various others who say, “Look at it this way” and “But what if” and “What about” until John Wayne finally gets mad.

“Anzio,” on the other hand, is a good war movie and even an intelligent one. It is told from the Italian point of view (which in itself makes it at least a fresh departure for a World War II movie), and argues that Anzio was a strategic defeat although a military victory. In the De Laurentiis version directed by Edward Dmytryk (“The Caine Mutiny,” “The Young Lions”), the Allied armies could have walked straight into Rome, but they cautiously stayed put while the Germans brought up reinforcements.

Once again, we see the action through the eyes of a correspondent (Robert Mitchum), who says he covers wars because he cannot understand why men fight them. Trapped behind enemy lines with six soldiers, he refuses on several occasions to accept a weapon. And when he kills for the first time, it is clear-cut self-defense; then he throws down the rifle. At film’s end, when the Allies enter Rome, Mitchum watches from beneath a 2,000-year-old Roman monument: “Nothing has changed,” he says, “except the uniforms and transportation.”

Most war movies consist of worn-out clichés mouthed by third-rate actors against phony backdrops of flashing machine-gun fire. Even good ones like Samuel Fuller’s “Merrill’s Marauders” tend to play as though their dialogue were written with flash cards; instead of anonymous men wandering around chaotically in front of tanks that don’t work or airplanes that fly backward or ships with Henry Fonda tied lashed to their funnels or something out of Norman Rockwell’s trip file instead of that sort of thing we get here for once coherent pictures both of what happened in terms anyone can understand, and of what human beings went through, and continue to go through. For once.

“Anzio” is the right length because it tells a story about real people instead of a myth about comic-book characters. The performances are on target: If Peter Falk’s commando enjoys war, that figures (and he handles some nice tough lines); if Mitchum is at his most desperate best searching for the right words as well as the right actions here they are.

To be sure, “Anzio” is not the kind of spectacular its name suggests: It doesn’t operate on the enormous scale of “The Longest Day.” But there have been too many war spectaculars anyway, and they’re usually disasters. It’s just that nobody has ever made an anti-war film with so many resources before, and this one, unusually enough, works.

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