Live Life Team
Genre: War
Director: Howard Hawks
Starring Cast: Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond
Alvin C. York is an irresponsible Tennessee mountain farmer trying to scratch a living out of the rocky earth. He finds religion after lightening strikes his rifle during a land dispute, forcing him to take a pacifist stance at the beginning of World War 1. However, he gradually adapts his Christian beliefs to the circumstances. In one of the most heroic actions of the war, the soldier with born again belligerence and armed with a Springfield rifle, wipes out thirty five German machine gunners and captures 132 prisoners almost single handed. He returns to his mother and girlfriend as a hero. The film, based on the true story of World War 1’s most decorated American soldier, was meant as an inspiration to American audiences emerging from isolationism to enter World War II. The real Alvin C. York, who only gave his permission to film his story if Gary Cooper played him, supervised every phase of the production. As a result, it is chronicled with exemplary fidelity, offering the perfect framework for Cooper’s sincerity and underplaying which exuded the goodness and faithfulness of the character. Cooper’s York, as has been notably quoted at the time “is the one of the most beloved illiterates the USA has ever known”. The director manages to balance an almost simplistic view of rural America with more hard hitting battle scenes.
