"San Pietro" (sometimes referred to as "The Battle of San Pietro") is only a
little over half an hour in length, but critic James Agee reckoned it the best
picture of 1945. Written, directed, and also eloquently narrated by John Huston,
it's a combat documentary ... more focused on the fight for one small town in Italy's
Liri Valley during the winter and spring of 1944. The film is both an official
document of the War Department and a personal, utterly characteristic Huston
movie. The finely judged irony of his delivery in no way subverts the noble,
unsentimentalized tribute to the men who fought and died at San Pietro, yet the
film is a lucid index of the inherent futility of war, as the war itself becomes
a metaphor for absurdity. After reels of slamming battle (much of it filmed
within small-arms fire of the enemy), the actual occupation of the town is
eerily anticlimactic: The Germans are simply no longer there, having withdrawn
to prepare for "more San Pietros, a thousand more" further along the route of
the war. The U.S. Army, having won its objective, must immediately march beyond
it, a strategic goal having been transmuted by the very success of their mission
into a liberated irrelevancy. (Huston would re-enact the same movement as the
final action of "The Red Badge of Courage" six years later.)
