John Huston made this war documentary whilst on assignment in Italy during WWII, and it has since become immortalised as an influential milestone in documentary filmmaking. Covering a brutal engagement between American and German soldiers, The Battle of San Pietro made waves for being a little too honest for war propaganda. Huston broke free of the usual constraints of wartime coverage by pushing the bar for realism higher, getting his camera in amongst the actual troops and daring to show war for what it was. For anyone with a passing interest in WWII this is an invaluable resource - an actual account of a battle made as it happened.
At 30 or so minutes I expected there to be a stronger narrative but this is mostly just pure footage narrated by Huston. The soldiers aren't heard, their story is entirely organic - they're just filmed doing what they do and it's all put together in a moderately linear fashion to show the course of the battle. I can't even imagine how frightening it would've been for people to see this documentary in the 1940s... this level of realism wasn't really seen again in fictional or documentary films until the 1970s with the Vietnam War, and The Battle of San Pietro wasn't really shown to the public at the time due to the army's disapproval of this. As a result, it was initially only used for training purposes by the United States Army, although this wasn't the audience Huston had intended for his film.
Huston's account is so brutally honest in its depiction of the cost of warfare that some parts are still hard to watch now. There are some rather harsh images of fatality, such as the image of troops marching across the ruined battlefield while the head of a dead soldier lies limp in the foreground. Huston was accused by some of deliberately making an anti-war film, but all he did was film the reality of war. It actually ends with the emergence of happy and relieved San Pietro village children, so despite being labelled as anti-war propaganda it's actually kind of an affirmation of America's place in the European theatre of war as a force for liberation.
At 30 or so minutes I expected there to be a stronger narrative but this is mostly just pure footage narrated by Huston. The soldiers aren't heard, their story is entirely organic - they're just filmed doing what they do and it's all put together in a moderately linear fashion to show the course of the battle. I can't even imagine how frightening it would've been for people to see this documentary in the 1940s... this level of realism wasn't really seen again in fictional or documentary films until the 1970s with the Vietnam War, and The Battle of San Pietro wasn't really shown to the public at the time due to the army's disapproval of this. As a result, it was initially only used for training purposes by the United States Army, although this wasn't the audience Huston had intended for his film.
Huston's account is so brutally honest in its depiction of the cost of warfare that some parts are still hard to watch now. There are some rather harsh images of fatality, such as the image of troops marching across the ruined battlefield while the head of a dead soldier lies limp in the foreground. Huston was accused by some of deliberately making an anti-war film, but all he did was film the reality of war. It actually ends with the emergence of happy and relieved San Pietro village children, so despite being labelled as anti-war propaganda it's actually kind of an affirmation of America's place in the European theatre of war as a force for liberation.
DIRECTOR: John Huston
NARRATOR: John Huston
RELATED TEXTS:
- John Huston also made the war documentaries Winning Your Wings and Report From the Aleutians.- For a fictional Huston film about WWII, see Heaven Knows Mr. Allison.
- Other American WWII documentaries made by famous directors: The Battle of Midway (John Ford), Why We Fight (Frank Capra), Sex Hygiene (John Ford), Torpedo Squadron (John Ford), December 7th (John Ford), You John Jones! (Mervyn LeRoy), Memphis Belle (William Wyler), Tunisian Victory (Frank Capra), Death Mills (Billy Wilder), The Fleet That Came to Stay (Budd Boetticher), Here is Germany (Frank Capra), The Last Bomb (Frank Lloyd), Know Your Enemy (Frank Capra), The Town (Josef von Sternberg), The True Glory (Carol Reed), Two Down and One to Go (Frank Capra) and Your Job in Germany (Frank Capra).
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