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Rivera: It could've been something else. It could've been the engineers or the tanks. It could even have been the Navy. They looked at me and said, "Here's a guy that can walk." They finished me, all right.
Friedman: Everybody walks. Even monkeys.
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Windy: A man's hands never seem to get clean, even if he don't touch nothing. They just stay dirty. Sort of a special kind of dirt. G.I. dirt. I bet one of those criminologists could take a sample out of a guy's fingernail, put it under a microscope, and say, "That's G.I. dirt." The dirt's always the same color, no matter what country you're fighting in.
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Sergeant Tyne: Wonder what it'll be like when we hit France, Mac.
McWilliams: I don't know. I never seen France.
Sergeant Tyne: I bet its just a long concrete wall with a gun every yard. Maybe they'll set the water on fire with oil, too. Boy, when that day comes I wanna be somewhere else.
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Sergeant Tyne: Nothing slower than crawling. Nothing in the world. How long would it take to crawl around the world? A hundred years? A thousand years?
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Pvt. Archimbeau: Every dirty job in the army is my personal property.
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[last lines]
[after a desperate battle with many casualties Windy's platoon captures their objective]
Windy: Dear Frances, we just blew a bridge and took a farmhouse. It was so easy... so terribly easy.
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Windy: Hey, Tinker? How do you spell "Mare Nostrum?"
Tinker: What's that?
Windy: The Mediterranean. It's what the Eye-ties call it. It means "our sea."
Tinker: Why?
Windy: I'm writing to my sister.
Tinker: Whattya mean, you're writing to your sister? You're packed on a landing barge, bouncing on your Mare Nostrum, and waiting to hit the beach like the rest of us slobs.
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Friedman: You ever think you'll live to make corporal?
Rivera: Baby, I just want to live long enough to make civilian.
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Sergeant Tyne: It's a funny thing, how many people you meet in an army that cross your path for a few seconds and you never see 'em again.
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Rivera: Nobody dies.
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Friedman: Where are we going, Rivera?
Rivera: I am going someplace where I can set up this weapon. Then I am going to shoot this weapon. I am not gonna walk any more!
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[Windy composes a letter while his landing craft is heading for the beachhead at Salerno under heavy fire]
Windy: Dear Frances, I am writing you this letter relaxing on the deck of a luxury liner. On shore the natives have evidently just spotted us and are getting up a reception - fireworks, music and that sort of stuff. Ha. The musicians in our own band have also struck up a little tune. Ha ha.
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Amazon.com
Alongside larger-scaled epics, this 1945 drama looks modest, but director Lewis Milestone achieves a gritty realism that is ultimately closer to the truth of combat. A World War I veteran, Milestone had already created a classic war film--and powerful antiwar statement--in 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front, focusing on German troops in the trenches during "the Great War." For obvious reasons, A Walk in the Sun views the action from the perspective of American troops, but Milestone and a strong cast headed by Dana Andrews and Richard Conte prove remarkably clear-eyed in this chronicle of a platoon moving through the Italian countryside following the successful, but bloody, invasion of Italy. There's little of the cheerleading fervor or reflexive demonizing of the enemy visible in other films from the period; instead, the men's treacherous odyssey captures the sense of random chaos as their bucolic trek is interrupted by sudden skirmishes. We're shown the deep bonds forged between the soldiers, the loss of innocence that is the inevitable price of combat experience, and the capricious fates that can spare one soldier while exterminating another. Milestone would extend his mastery of wartime fiction to include the Korean War, captured in the equally fine, equally sobering Pork Chop Hill. --Sam Sutherland
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