A Walk in the Sun was Lewis Milestone’s second collaboration with screenwriter Robert Rossen, based on Harry Joe Brown’s 1944 book.
Rossen would become a distinguished director on his own right)
The director invested $30,000 of his own savings, a measure of his enthusiasm for the literary property and its cinematic potential.
A Walk in the Sun takes place during the U.S. invasion of Italy in WWII: a platoon of American soldiers are tasked with advancing inland six miles from Salerno to take a German-held bridge and farmhouse. The social and economic backgrounds of the officers and men represent a cross-section of America, who often express ambivalence about the purpose of the war.
Critic Kingley Canham describes the characters as “a group of unwilling civilians, who find themselves at war in a strange land…a sense of hopelessness pervades the film and the final outcome means nothing to the men who are fighting the war…”
Milestone’s perspective on war as conveyed in A Walk in the Sun differs with that of his 1930 Oscar winner, All Quiet on the Western Front, which offered a moving indictment of war.
Biographer Joseph Millichap observes: “All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and the film, used the microcosm of one platoon to make a major thematic statement about the macrocosm of war. A Walk in the Sun’s thematic statement is muted by the demands of propaganda and the studio system in the film.”
Despite these limitations, Milestone avoided the “set hero and mock heroics” typical of Hollywood war movies, allowing for genuine realism reminiscent of his 1930 masterwork.
Milestone’s trademark handling of long tracking shots is evident in the action scenes.
