Sergeant York Review (1941) (Throwback Thursday #10)
Director: Howard Hawks
Writer: Harry Chandlee, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Howard Koch
Starring: Gary Cooper, Walter Brennan, Joan Leslie, George Tobias, Stanley Ridges, Margaret Wycherly
Release Date: September 27, 1941
This review is part of our countdown to the Fourth of July. Sergeant York landed at number ten on our list of the 10 Best Movies to Watch on the Fourth of July, and if you haven’t checked that list out yet, head there first and then come back. We’re working through every film on it leading up to Independence Day.
I came into Sergeant York knowing the broad strokes of the real story but having never actually sat down and watched the film. I fixed that, and I’m glad I did, because this one earned its reputation.
The film splits into two distinct halves and honestly they’re almost different movies. The first half is set entirely in rural Tennessee and it plays like a warm, unhurried portrait of mountain life at the turn of the last century. Alvin York (Gary Cooper) is introduced as a hard-drinking, brawling troublemaker who isn’t evil, just unfocused. He’s got a good heart buried under bad habits and no real direction until he decides he wants a piece of bottomland that would let him start a proper farm and win the hand of Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie). He works himself half to death to get it, loses it through bad luck, and in the aftermath has a conversion experience that flips his entire life around. That sequence, where a lightning strike knocks him off his horse on the way to do something he’d have regretted, is handled with restraint. Hawks doesn’t play it as a theatrical miracle. He plays it quiet and matter of fact, the way a man who actually believes in Providence would tell it. It works.
Cooper is the reason the whole thing holds together. He was reportedly York’s personal choice for the role, and you can see why. There’s an authenticity to Cooper that no amount of acting craft can manufacture. He’s not performing sincerity, he just has it. The Tennessee accent he’s working with wouldn’t survive a dialect coach’s scrutiny today but it doesn’t matter because Cooper sells the character from the inside out. When Alvin reads his Bible, you believe he’s reading his Bible. When he wrestles with whether killing in war can be reconciled with his faith, you believe that too. It’s a career performance and it got him the Oscar.
Walter Brennan plays Pastor Pile and turns in what might be the warmest performance of his career, which is saying something given his track record. He’s funny without being a clown and wise without being preachy, and the relationship between him and Cooper carries real affection.
The second half shifts to France and the Argonne Offensive, and this is where the film earns its place on a July 4th list. The battle sequences are obviously limited by 1941 production capabilities but Hawks shoots them with enough grit to keep them from feeling staged. What makes the famous York incident work on screen isn’t spectacle, it’s method. Alvin figures out that German soldiers will pop their heads up in sequence like turkeys if you call out to them, and he uses the same technique he’d developed turkey hunting back home to work his way down the line. It’s almost absurdly matter of fact for what he’s actually doing, and that’s exactly right. The real York described it the same way.
There’s a tension running through the whole film that I want to give credit to because it would have been easy to smooth over it. Alvin never fully resolves his internal conflict, he just decides. He decides that stopping the machine guns from killing more of his men is the right thing to do even if he can’t square it perfectly with Scripture. He does what he believes he has to and he goes home and he doesn’t celebrate it. The film honors that complexity instead of writing it off with a neat resolution. That’s what separates Sergeant York from pure propaganda.
It also helps that the man himself was genuinely remarkable. York refused every commercial opportunity that came his way after the war, turned down money from Hollywood for years, and only agreed to the film when he needed funding for a Bible school he was trying to build for the kids in his county. That’s the story underneath the story, and the film is honest enough to let it breathe.
Not a perfect film, the pacing drags in spots and the romance is the weakest element, but this is exactly the kind of movie that used to get made and doesn’t anymore. A man of faith, a man of his community, a genuine American hero, and a story told without irony or condescension. Worth every minute.
Sergeant York gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.
If you’re in the mood for more war films worth your time, we’ve got a full Memorial Day Movie Hub with reviews covering some of the best ever made. And check back here as we continue working through the 10 Best Movies to Watch on the Fourth of July leading up to Independence Day.
Let me know what you think of Sergeant York in the comments below.
