Overlooked Movies: The Fighting 69th (1940)

With yesterday being Memorial Day, Livia and I watched something appropriate to the occasion: THE FIGHTING 69^TH, a 1940 film about the 69^th Infantry Regiment during World War I. Neither of us had ever seen it before, a little surprising considering how many times it ran on TV when we were growing up. It’s a mixture of history and fiction and has a great cast of Warner Brothers stalwarts. James Cagney plays Jerry Plunkett, a wise-cracking tough guy from Brooklyn who’s befriended by the unit’s chaplain, Father Francis Duffy (Pat O’Brien), one of the actual historical figures in the story. The 69^th is commanded by Major William “Wild Bill” Donovan (George Brent), who during World War II commanded the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. Another historical figure who shows up is Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, the well-known poet. Then there are the other fictional characters such as the blustering but good-hearted sergeant (Alan Hale), the comic relief who’s always mooching cigarettes (Frank McHugh), the Jewish soldier who pretends to be Irish because he wants to be part of the 69^th (Sammy Cohen), and various other dogfaces played by Dennis Morgan, Dick Foran, William Lundigan, William Hopper, George Reeves, and the great Guinn “Big Boy” Williams.

Not surprisingly, we get a fairly lengthy boot camp sequence to introduce us to the characters before they go overseas, and then it’s off to France for action in the trenches, and the movie really excels in those scenes. It’s brutal and terrifying, not at all the light-hearted, glory-seeking lark that some of the soldiers expected, and as it turns out, Cagney’s character can’t handle it and commits several acts of cowardice that result in the deaths of other soldiers. He’s courtmartialed and sentenced to death, but circumstances provide him with an opportunity to redeem himself. Which we all knew was coming, of course, but honestly, would we have it any other way?

THE FIGHTING 69^TH is episodic but very well-made, with a great cast and some really harrowing battle scenes. Many modern viewers probably consider movies like this hokey, but I’ll watch ’em all day and enjoy them.