In 1979 the nostalgia about the second world war was slightly displaced but could easily be explained by the defeat in Vietnam in 1975 and all the films about the horror this war in Vietnam was. Let's compensate slightly and enjoy WW2 when the Yanks were welcomed (kind of) in Europe and expected to give a good spanking to the Germans, if not the Nazis, or vice versa. But there is no Kwai river in Europe. So let us make it sentimental and evoke the meeting of the Yanks with their distant British cousins in England getting ready for the second front and then the third. So the whole film is given some life with its being centered on the relation between one man from Arizona and one girl from the small city where the Yanks are camping. Possible and impossible passion at the same time, possible in the mind and impossible in the body because of the immense chasm between the two worlds, the two civilizations. It is a little pathetic, and yet probably true. A culture that says the girl of another man is sacred and a woman from another world has to be tamed and introduced with time and in time, not taken and used for a short while and forgotten when departure day arrives. You add to that the difficult relation between some white GIs and the black GIs, plus the impossibility for the other white GIs who are not openly hostile to the black GIs, hence who are not openly racist, to prevent or stop the racist provocation and then fight. Does it make a good film? It would have been good in the 50s. But four years after the defeat in Vietnam it is slightly too romantic and even simplistic to really erase the humiliation of 1975. The film 30 years later becomes slightly too sweet to be digestible. For having lived up to 1965 with GIs in my city and having seen their disruptive presence every Sunday along the embankments of the harbor, alcohol, prostitution, and a few other things of the type, I can testify it was probably a lot more drastic and sinister in England, in war time, waiting for the front, knowing that they may never come back from it. The film then appears idyllic, and in a way weak.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID