The Story of G.I. Joe.

Directed by William A. Wellman; cinematography by Russell Metty; screenplay by Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore, and Philip Stevenson, based on the journalism of Ernie Pyle; starring Robert Mitchum, Burgess Meredith, Freddie Steele, Jimmy Lloyd and Wally Cassell. DVD, black and white, 108 mins. Distributed by Image Entertainment.

Though not exactly lost, Ernie Pyle's The Story of G.I. Joe, produced by Lester Cowan and directed by William A. Wellman, has been generally unavailable for decades, and being missing in action has only enhanced its stature. "I cannot suggest my regard for it without using words such as veneration and love," intoned film critic James Agee, a notoriously tough audience. For wartime moviegoers, melancholy shrouded the original reception: Pyle, the beloved war correspondent and spiritual auteur of the film, was killed by a sniper five months before its postwar release in October 1945. Perhaps as a result, the critically-esteemed paean to the common dogface garnered tepid box-office returns, not that you can blame war-weary Americans for passing up another somber combat film.

Like so many WWII-era films, the prototype plays like the cliche--the mascot pooch that melts the hearts of the gruff GIs, the good natured grumbling ("Why wasn't I born 4-F instead of good looking?"), the lover-boy Italian (Wally Cassell) flirting between firefights, the behind-the-lines wedding ceremony interrupted by an artillery barrage ("Hit the dirt!," yells the padre), the rock-ribbed sergeant who flips out when he hears the recorded voice of his son on a disk, and the magnificent leader of men Captain Walker (a sleek Robert Mitchum in the full flower of youth). Shuffling and bringing up the rear, gamely trying to keep up is the creaky, diminutive journalist Ernie Pyle (lookalike Burgess Meredith), who at age forty-three earns the sobriquet "Pops" from the men of C company, eighteenth infantry.

As if bound by a blood oath with Pyle and the troops, The Story of G.I. Joe strives not for ruthless verisimilitude--an impossibility under the Production Code--but for a stark revision of the usual Hollywood romanticism. Boasting platoons of military advisors in the credits and a cast beefed up by authentic GIs, the film targets an ideal audience of war-hardened veterans expert in the ritual, vernacular, and ordinance of combat at ground zero, men who, like the GI Joes on screen, can identify artillery by the sound of the shell whizzing though the air ("Hey, that's ours: one-oh- fives." "Theirs: eighty-eights.") Even the censors seemed impressed enough to wink at the occasional violation in gesture and word. A GI nonchalantly scratches his ass, another spits out a semiblasphemy, an artillery blast nearly, but not quite, drowning out the last word: "I'm a Catholic and I want to see the monastery blown to hell."

With Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun (1945), The Story of G.I. Joe signaled a late-war shift away from upbeat tributes to the glorious flyboys of the Army Air Force and toward belated recognition of the endurance and grit of the GI infantryman, the soldier who would be labeled a 'grunt' in a later, far less popular war. Suffering from pilot envy, resentful of the celebration of the bomber crews in Air Force (1943), the combat report The Memphis Belle (1944), and They Were Expendable (1945), a GI in The Story of G.I. Joe refers to the flyers self-reflexively as "Hollywood's heroes." While the airman at least dies clean-shaven and well-fed, says Pyle, the infantry man "lives so miserably and he dies so miserably." Of course all this has its own austere romance: of Hemingwayesque grace under pressure, or what the Vietnam war infantryman Tim O'Brien called "wise endurance."

The apt visual motif is mud, rivers of it, caking boots, beards, weapons, and truck axles. As Agee noted, the look of the unkempt men and the mud-drenched landscape owes more to the popular Willie and Joe cartoons by Bill Mauldin than to the typeset columns of Ernie Pyle. Taking the cue, Wellman's camera hugs the soil. Himself a former flyer in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I, Wellman makes a leap of imaginative identity, never letting his own flyboy sympathies misdirect his gaze from ground level to aerial perspectives. When a strafing plane sheds first blood on a convoy, the men who fire back, like the spectator, cannot even glimpse the source of death from above.

The crisp black-and-white cinematography of Russell Metty well suits Wellman's line of sight. The rich monochromatic shadings might be described as newsreel noir, a style that would blossom in the on-location urban melodramas shot by a generation of combat-trained cameraman unleased from the tethers of the studio sound stage. The blend of authentic combat footage, real and reenacted, from John Huston's The Battle of San Pietro (1945), fits seamlessly into the more artful, choreographed shots of troops silhouetted against the light of dusk.

Gorgeous in moody low-key light, brandishing a decidedly nonregulation mane of wavy auburn hair, Robert Mitchum glows as an instant icon of virile American masculinity. He is a veritable Hector in khaki, a magnet for spectatorial attention whose high-magnitude star power undercuts the egalitarian ethos of combat-squad teamwork. The G.I. Joe backstory would help make Mitchum the definitive sad-eyed combat veteran in classic noirs like Crossfire (1947) and Out of the Past (1947). (In real life, Mitchum accepted a hardship discharge after a brief enlistment. "I don't look good in khaki," he later lied, explaining his lack of patriotic zeal.) Mostly, he just stands around looking laconic, but during his big scene--a vino-induced expression of love for his men--he earns his screen space.

In making The Story of G.I. Joe available again, Image Entertainment underscores the compensations of a DVD world, but the wraparound material--the 'special features' that are one of the main attractions of the digital format--is stingy: only a brief sound newsreel featuring the real Ernie Pyle chatting with a group of GIs, a reprint of a single wartime column, and brief liner notes by Pyle biographer James Tobin--no trailers, outtakes, commentary, or other goodies. For the modern viewer, some background to the military campaigns the GI Joes trudge through--North Africa, the march up the boot of Italy, and the battle for Monte Cassino--might have been welcome. On the other hand, the lack of the usual cartographical orientation and clear tactical goals captures the target fixation and geographical confusion of the American GIs in the film itself. "Someday," mutters a dogface, "I'm gonna buy me a map and find out where I've been."

A true late-period WWII film, bone weary and battle sore, The Story of G.I. Joe eschews triumphalism--likable guys are killed in action, some just disappear, the strong freak out, and the noblest die. When filmmakers lavish so much more loving detail on the down time than the big bangs, it is difficult to call so quiet and contemplative a mood piece a combat film. Consider the dreamy interlude where, courtesy of Axis Sally, the woodwind music of Artie Shaw wafts over a nighttime bivouac and a montage of faces listens wordlessly, unspooling private memories. "Tonight I dream in Technicolor," sighs a happy sleeper. Likewise, the final tableaux is justly famous: the body of Captain Walker slung across a mule, brought back from a battlefield, the manner of his death unrecorded and unimportant, unbearable that such a man should perish in such conditions. "It is quite possible, in perspective, that this film may be judged the greatest nondocumentary to come out of the war," predicted Variety in 1945, a line that t oday reads more like prophecy than ballyhoo.

Thomas Doherty is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and author of numerous books, including Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II, Teenagers and Teenpics and Pre-Code Hollywood