Sergeant York (1941)
Directed by Howard Hawks
Alvin York a hillbilly sharpshooter transforms himself from ruffian to religious pacifist. He is then called to serve his country and despite deep religious and moral objections to fighting becomes one of the most celebrated American heroes of WWI.
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What critics compared Sergeant York to
Consider the 1941 movie "Sergeant York," a very similar true story that takes place in World War I. Gary Cooper plays Alvin York, another backwoods CO soldier and sharpshooter, who finds his way into battle after reading the "Render unto Caesar" quote from the New Testament.
You’ll be forgiven during the first hour of Hacksaw Ridge if you wonder whether someone has slipped in a reel from Sergeant York, Howard Hawks’ 1941 war drama about the real-life pacifist sharpshooter Alvin C. York.
"Hacksaw Ridge" continues a tradition of wartime valor mixed with conscience as old as "Sergeant York" -- only here, presented in Technicolor, with a lot more gore.
Hacksaw Ridge has a patriotic valiance and dauntless candor that recall Sergeant York, the 1941 Gary Cooper film.
A devout Catholic with an almost erotic fixation on violence, Mel Gibson was the perfect choice to direct this update on “Sergeant York,” in which Desmond, a gangly young hillbilly beautifully played by Andrew Garfield, grows up in a landscape steeped in bloodshed.
There a problem arises, for Doss refuses to hold a rifle: a stance that not even Gary Cooper, as the devout pacifist of “Sergeant York” (1941), could match.
It’s either a new generation’s Sergeant York or the misguided American equivalent of that Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008).
Biopics about American war heroes are a Hollywood tradition going all the way back to Gary Cooper starring as the legendary World War I sharpshooter "Sergeant York" and World War II's highly decorated Audie Murphy playing himself in "To Hell and Back." "American Sniper" is squarely in that mold, but because it's directed by Clint Eastwood something else is going on as well.
Like The Hurt Locker and a century’s worth of war movies that preceded it—from Sergeant York to Saving Private Ryan—it provides an opportunity to examine the artistic representation of combat.
Eastwood’s Chris is a movie war hero with echoes of Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York , the good-ole-boy pacifist who won the Medal of Honor for killing 28 Germans and capturing another 132 in a World War I raid, and Jeremy Renner’s Sgt.
Bulked up yet still able to express his signature neuroticism (dialed down from the David O. Russell comedies), Cooper has never been better, registering a seesawing psychology on par with Gary Cooper’s turn in Sergeant York.
The drama, scattered among so many characters as it is, eventually evolves into a 1944 plot called Operation Kino to blow up Goebbels, Goring, Bormann and other members of the German High Command at a cinema in Paris where a Goebbels propaganda film starring “the German Sergeant York ” Daniel Bruhl is to have its premiere.
There are even shout-outs to Hawks’ Sergeant York and director G.W. Pabst, among others.
Some of the movies Tarantino alludes to are The Big Red One, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, To Be or Not to Be, Sergeant York, and a bevy of others.