MovieChat Forums > Battle Cry (1955) Discussion > Surprised that there is a message board ...

Surprised that there is a message board for this movie.


I thought I had seen this movie, but the description of it doesn't ring any bells. At first I confused it with another Aldo Ray war movie--The Naked and the Dead. I came here because of a question in a newspaper crossword, "Ray from Battle Cry." four letters. Totally forgot about ol' Aldo there, plus the person needing help with the crossword had already mucked up my guesses with wrong answers in the other spaces. Elio was what we came up with, so a trip to IMDb was in order.

Amazing the stories here in the board. Everyone's life can make some interesting movie. I want to see it now for the scenes with Virgil (the Finger) Deckard and Uncle Tippy from the other posts. Also to see Nancy Olson in a non-Disney film.

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This movie was supposedly a big hit at the box office but savaged by the critics. Easy to see why. The plot is predictable. The dialog is so cheesy that even a good actor couldn't save it. The characters are cliched, and to quote one of them:
"shame, shame, shame"....

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yeah I am a bit surprised, better movies doesn't have even a single thread.
This movie is corny, cheesy, predictable, cartoonished, outdated, propagandistic, with lots of wooden acting, a soap opera of the worst kind.
I just saw it complete because I was in the house of my GF and I didn't want to be unpolite by leaving the room, but I was falling asleep during the entire movie.

2/10 at most! awful movie! (if not for the ravishing girls who appears in this movie, this one would be totally unwatchable!)

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.

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totally disagree, this movie comes closest to show that soldiers were normal men with interest that covered a wide range of items and the normal chasing women, drinking, reading etc the soldiers did durning the war.

The war story of the movie was only the sub plot and covered the war well.

Your living in a far different age than the common person of the WWII era, and thier lives and interest are far different than todays.

This movie was just remade as Windtalkers in 2002.

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I agree with Cinefil. This was awful and it has nothing to do with the times. There are far better written and acted fifties war films and this one is just Peyton Place in the South Pacific.

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I completely agree. There were far more realistic -even for that era- war films being made at that time.

For instance, 1949's Battleground is a film that still holds up well today. Sands of Iwo Jima is a surprisingly well-written character study as well as a film about combat action. (It's greatly helped by the insertion of actual combat footage into the battle scenes). To Hell and Back was another well-done war film of the era, where it showed Audie Murphy re-enacting his own war experiences. And of course, one of the best war films ever made, The Dam Busters came out around the same time. It was a film that strived to be so realistic that the director tried to cast actors that actually looked like the characters they were playing and was shot at some of the real locations.

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I agree with most of what you said, but wanted to do a (gentle)
"Jane, you ignorant sl-t!" about this movie being remade as
Windtalkers in 2002.

Even though there were scenes of Navajo codetalkers in Battle Cry,
they are two different movies with entirely different subject matter.

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This is a BAD MOVIE ... and it is comical that you say it was remade into Windtalkers in 2002. Yes they both had Navajo soldiers set in WW2 but that is the end of the similarities.

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I disagree with a lot of the negative assessments about this film. This was not meant to be a war film like others in the genre. It was a screen adaptation of the book Battle Cry, whose author Leon Uris wrote the screenplay. The movie is very faithful to the plot, characters and spirit of the book. The dialogue suffers in part because this was Uris' first foray into screenwriting. He would later go on to do QB VII and Exodus among others. (Uris was also a Marine radioman during WWII who saw action at Guadacanal and Iwo Jima.)

The line referenced "Shame, shame, shame." is a reflection of the different moral standards of the times, as are a lot of the love scenes and situations the characters find themselves confronting. To follow on a comment I posted in another thread, this isn't really a war movie. It is more of a drama set in wartime; where often the best stories of human virtue and human frailty are told.

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Many people only like war movies that are a little cheesy that's why it gets attention here. If it was just another typical war movie with lots of action I would pass on it.

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I read the book Battle Cry back around 1967, when I was in 8th grade. And I liked it, and it even might have been the reason I joined the Marine Corps in the mid-70's.

In the start of the movie I get goose bumps, seeing the same buildings that I was in at boot camp.

I like to watch the movie, because it is one of the more realistic depictions of boot camp, although abbreviated, and unlike others here in this post, I do enjoy the cheesy drama. I was with 87 other recruits in a close (too close) environment, and cheesy is what it was sometimes.

You just never know what you are gonna get when you take 88 people from all over the country and throw them together in a stressful situation. Or? Maybe you do, Leon Uris wrote a book about it, called Battle Cry.

I like the character development as well, from Spanish Joe, all the way to Major Huxley. My favorite story is that of Andy and "Mrs. Pat Rogers." It still makes me sad today about Andy losing his leg, and how it demoralized him, not to mention the drama of their relationship that led up to that.

I want to nitpick all the negative comments that I read in this post, but some of them are just trolling trying to invoke emotions for reasons that have nothing to do with the movie. After boot camp, when I was a Lance Corporal, I went to OCS and became a 2t Lt, and learned even more about how the Marine Corps works, in the intricate ways that it creates (as well as sometimes destroys) relationships.

And I learned even more from a different perspective, about how realistic stories like the one Leon Uris told can be, but are sometimes too cheesy for the modern young people to understand. Perhaps it is no more than a difference of opinion of what a good movie (or book) is.

But when it comes to the Marine Corps, where I went from Private to Captain in 10 years, I know something about the subject. When others speak to this movie not being about the times accurately, they have never been in the USMC, because almost any story is timeless, when it comes to the emotions of the training, and the heart felt feelings that you just don't forget.

Just like Huxley's crazy forced march in the movie, I once was involved in one similar while at the Basic School for Officers, where we went 10 miles, then went on for another 5, then we had to go back, when we could barely move anymore. It was Major Conway pushing us on, who later became the 34th Commandant of the Marine Corps.



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