Battle Cry

Battle Cry kicks off by introducing us to a pretty diverse cast of characters heading to war—there’s the bookish intellectual in glasses, the all-American hero who's tough as nails, the humble but even tougher poor kid, and the Native American soldier who’s the butt of the jokes. After that, the movie dives into a war story mixed with a heavy dose of romantic subplots that take up about 125 minutes of screen time. Honestly, I had to skip through some of that because it was tough to sit through. The big payoff is a large-scale war scene at the end, with lots of extras and explosions, which is pretty impressive for a 1955 movie. But then I remember Paths of Glory—Kubrick’s 70-minute war film that was released around the same time. That one was packed with tension and truly captured the chaos of war. Comparing the two, Battle Cry just doesn’t hold up for me, so I have to settle on two stars. (2012-07-16)