12 Apr The Way Ahead
(1944) Lieutenant Perry, played by David Niven, has a tough job turning a group of British army conscripts into real soldiers.
To be honest, I felt like I was watching two different movies. The first half was light-hearted. The men in Niven’s battalion do a lot of grumbling and philosophizing. On Sundays, they visit a lady in town who serves them tea and listens to their woes.
Then they go to war. On the way to North Africa, their ship is torpedoed. The fires are quickly out of control, and they have to abandon ship. Then they are in a fierce battle with the Germans, running out of ammunition, and refusing to surrender.
At the end, all of a sudden all the soldiers stand up and start walking toward the Germans.
Instead of seeing “The End” on the screen, you see “The Beginning.” The narrator reads, “This is not a story of the past. It’s a story of the future. It shows us the kind of men democracies have produced and will continue to produce … those boys who turned their backs upon civilian life, who gave up the quiet joys of peaceful living to accept the discipline, the danger, and the glory of army life. It happens that the eight men whose lives we follow in the picture are British tommies. But those of us who have been with our own troops know that this is the story of our G.I. Joes too, and that is a story that will never die.”
The Way Ahead was released in Britain on D-Day. Almost a year later it came to the U. S. retitled Immortal Battalion.
That title leads me to believe that none of them made it.
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