the audience applauded

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Henry Fonda walks through this disappointing film about a corporal who learns to be a man and "fight for what he wants" after his squad's sergeant (Thomas Mitchell) is killed and he has to take over the squad in the Libyan desert. The tensionless war scenes are broken up by dull flashbacks of Fonda's relationship with Maureen O'Hara, who he treats as kind of a gal pal because he's just too shy or unsure of himself to go for despite the fact she is obviously hungering for him (only because there's a British fop also after her. Maureen had to be hungering for John Wayne to show up as a Yank so she could blow off both of these losers).The direction is pedestrian and the script would have been thrown away by Wayne or Stewart. I particularly enjoyed seeing the soldiers walk through the desert in the daytime in foul weather gear while its hot and they're dying of thirst. Yes, it gets cold in the desert at night. But this wasn't at night!

Henry Fonda looks just like he appeared in 1940's "The Grapes of Wrath."This is quite a good film detailing several soldiers caught in Africa during World War 11 and how they eventually overcome their perils.Thomas Mitchell, as the old-time sergeant is a standout here. There is able support by Allyn Joslyn, Reginald Gardiner and others.Maureen O'Hara is used mainly in flashbacks here as Fonda thinks back of his past while trying to lead his men to freedom.The ending seems rushed up as Fonda wakes up in the hospital and is told how they got out of their predicament.

This is one of those movies about a handful of soldiers lost in the desert who must find and fight their way home. But, if the plot is familiar, this is a pretty well executed example.Combat aside, it's the story of the maturation of Henry Fonda, the bashful, receding, passive, loner of a corporal who suddenly finds himself in charge when his sergeant is killed. Fonda's character has what psychologists call a primary trait. That is, he is excessively something or other. It's the part of him that everyone notices. Whenever we do a statistical analysis of personality characteristics, one of the first to show up is likely to be introversion/extraversion, and Fonda is high on introversion. This is one of the "Big Five" personality traits, if anyone wants to bother looking it up. There are numerous flashback too, involving Fonda's self-effacing quality interfering with his relationship with Maureen O'Hara. He can't bring himself to declare his love for her, and meanwhile the gregarious Reginald Gardner (just the opposite, high on extraversion) is taking his place. These kinds of back stories are usually annoying but in this case I can bring myself to forgive them because Maureen O'Hara at twenty-two is sublime. Not "pretty" in any ordinary way. If you asked an artist to sit down and draw a picture of a beautiful woman it wouldn't come out looking like O'Hara. Her nose is more like an eagle's than like a ski slope. And her chin is a little larger than would be required to accommodate her lips. And she's not even a phenomenally talented actress. Really, a performance by an actor is made up half of demands imposed by the script and half by the organismic variables the actor brings to the role. And O'Hara's gestures at enacting the role of the girl friend back home are so perfunctory that we readily sense the real person beneath -- and she's radiant. So, anyway, okay. She can stay in the film.I first saw this years ago on KVZK and remembered it only for O'Hara's presence and for a scene in which a disabled Italian aircraft crashes into a truck full of British soldiers. I just saw it again and those two are still its most outstanding features.The combat scenes are well done for the time too. It's exciting as well as thoughtful. I wouldn't blame anyone for disliking it because it's just another phony war movie with romantic flashbacks, but in my opinion, although it is that, it's something more as well. It might have been called, "How To Conquer Your Introversion" and been written by a media-savvy politician.

In his memoirs Henry Fonda hated this film above all others that he did in his career. That's taking in quite a bit of territory because Fonda did some dreadful stuff in the seventies like Tentaccoli with a giant octopus. A lot of this was done for the money and Fonda with five wives certainly had much expenses in alimony.But Immortal Sergeant held a place dear in his heart because of the head of 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. Back in 1940 in order to get the part of Tom Joad, Fonda made a faustian deal with Zanuck signing his only studio contract. The studio cast him in what he considered junk. The good films he made in that four year stretch were on loan out, to Paramount for The Lady Eve, to Warner Brothers for The Male Animal, to RKO for The Big Street. He was not fond of what Fox cast him in for the most part because he got what was left after Tyrone Power and Don Ameche rejected it.Anyway come 1943 Fonda had two objectives, to make The Oxbow Incident because he knew that would be a classic and to enlist in World War II as pal Jimmy Stewart did. He prevailed on Zanuck to do The Oxbow Incident and it was a cheaply made western, classic though it was because it was shot completely on the sound stage. Then Zanuck cajoled, begged, and pleaded with him to make this one more film which he said was a great propaganda piece one that would tear the hearts of the movie going public and rally the homefront and be an inspiration to the fighting troops.When Immortal Sergeant proved somewhat less than that, Fonda felt hoodwinked and gritted his teeth and finished the film. He tried in fact to enlist to get out of it and Zanuck had so much pull in Washington, DC, Fonda kept getting his enlistment postponed.It was one angry Henry Fonda who finished The Immortal Sergeant and then went to war. His experience with this film made him bound and determined to get out of his contract one way or another. Ultimately he left Hollywood in 1948 when he got a great Broadway role in Mister Roberts. Fonda didn't return to Hollywood until 1955 and then to make the screen version of Mister Roberts.But that's getting away from Immortal Sergeant. Without Henry Fonda's rather colored viewpoint of the situation let me say it's not the worst World War II flag waver the studios put out. As is usual Henry Fonda is a Canadian to explain his non-British speech who has enlisted in the British army and is serving in North Africa. He's a young man with a lot of angst and when his patrol's sergeant is killed, Fonda has to summon something from within to bring the men back to their lines.Thomas Mitchell is the sergeant and Maureen O'Hara is Fonda's girl back home and both do a creditable job. For the rest of his life Fonda would foam at the mention of Immortal Sergeant. Being the professional he was, he did a good job in the film.But Immortal Sergeant hardly belongs in the same company as The Oxbow Incident and Mister Roberts in the works of Henry Fonda.