Sorry, this movie sucks

Good concept, poorly executed.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

So much has been said in the reviews to date that none of it bears repeating, but there are a couple of points one should be aware of before investing 1hr 45min into this movie. Though filmed in 1952, the style has the feel of a movie from the late 30's/early 40's with the slapstick violence, goofy foreigners, and hammy acting. I expect and tolerate these things from pre-WWII flicks, but is hard to take from something produced in the 1950's.As far as the anti-war element goes, this version is more of a tragic story of war than a pacifist piece. No pacifist here, but if you are looking for this from What Price Glory you'll be disappointed.

Well, despite having made "The Sands of Iwo Jima", John Ford made a movie about World War I Marines that doesn't really seem to be about Marines at all. I'm not a student of World War I Marine slang, but it seemed odd for Captain Flagg to pronounce Sergeant Quirt his "Top Soldier" and for Marines to refer to each other as soldiers. Despite the fact that they under French command, I found it odd for them to refer to being in the Army, since they are in the Corps. Go figure.The two combat scenes are amateurish, even by Ford's standards. The acting is not convincing (except when Robert Wagner dies and Cagney manages not to over-act it) and while you can believe the two main characters don't like each other at the beginning, you never believe there's some odd tie binding them together. The character development is relatively tame, with only Wagner and Harry Morgan (Colonel Potter as a Marine Corporal and quartermaster!) showing any depth among the minor Marine characters.Dan Dailey does play a convincing loud, parade ground senior NCO. He conveys the conniving and womanizing well, but when he is supposed to have finally fallen for the French beauty, it's hard to believe. Cagney plays merely a caricature of the hard-bitten, seen-it-all Marine. His final scene neither convinces you he considers staying or that the Corps means so much to him that he has to go.The worst part is when a wounded Marine shouts out the title of the movie. It's something along the lines of "Are you going to get in the game, Captain? There's two minutes left and we need a hero. What price glory, Captain? What price glory?" One can imagine that delivered stirringly by a character whose motivation we understand, but instead, it is shouted by a nameless face with only a crazed look. It also would help if the Captain had been portrayed as a glory hound instead of drunken, war-weary yet sympathetic. I guess they had to get the name of the movie in somehow....I was trying to imagine John Ford's World War I and was sadly disappointed that it wasn't more moving.

"What Price Glory" is a World War I lover's triangle set against the ravaged backdrop of French countryside circa, 1918. Drama aside, the film is not what one might expect from directorial giant John Ford. James Cagney is a bit over the hill to be believable as Capt. Flagg, a stoic commander of a motley troupe of conscripts. Flagg's ill at ease postulating does not bode well with his men, so he turns to disrespectful and disreputable Sgt. Quirt (Dan Dailey) for a little bit of hard knock military strength. But the tensions between Flagg and Quirt are pressed to the breaking point when they both fall for the same girl – stop me if you've heard this one before. Strong performances elevate this film above the tripe that – generally – it is. THE TRANSFER: Frankly, not up to snuff. Although the overall color scheme has retained much of its original luster, the picture quality is a disappointment. There is an excessive amount of film grain and age related artifacts throughout for a not very smooth visual presentation. Fluctuations in color balancing are – at times – severe and distracting. There is a minor amount of digital grit that further detracts from the image. Black levels are weak. Contrast and shadow delineation is poorly balanced for a very unstable looking presentation. The audio has been cleaned up but remains strident sounding and lacking in bass quality. EXTRAS: As with the other war films in this batch from Fox, you get nothing to augment your experience. BOTTOM LINE: "What Price Glory" isn't recommended either as a war film, or for its transfer quality. Seek satisfying your thirst for conquest elsewhere.

One of the great anti-war plays of the 1920s was Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory. The play expressed popular American feeling that we were never going to war again like that and endure the slaughter in those trenches in France that occurred in the short time we were there. Remember we only declared war in 1917 and the thing had been going on in Europe for three years by the time we got there.One of the things Woodrow Wilson as President and the American Expeditionary Force commander John Pershing insisted on was that the American army when fully trained would fight as a unit and not just be replacement troops for the French and British already there. They deviated only once from that policy when the American First Marine Division became the first American troops in battle in World War I at Belleau Wood. These Marines depicted here are part of those troops.John Ford is one of our great American directors and when he does his own work on material never before used he's produced some remarkable cinema. But here he takes a serious anti-war play and turns it into one of his service comedies. There certainly are comedic elements in What Price Glory, but it's a serious picture.The original silent film version done by Raoul Walsh was faithful to Maxwell Anderson's spirit and introduced those two Marines Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen who were so popular as Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt that they went and starred in a slew of buddy films. In fact they and James Cagney and Pat O'Brien introduced and popularized the buddy film genre.Cagney steps into McLaglen shoes here and Dan Dailey plays Sergeant Quirt. They played two belligerent oafs in this and play them well, but no one ever thought of re-teaming them.John Ford should have let this classic alone.