Last weekend we saw Sergeant York (1941) with a dignified Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan. Brennan was enough like his The Real McCoys (1957) character that it didn't take long to recognize him, although he didn't lay on the old coot quite so thick.

Spoilers

I had assumed it was a war movie, while it's really a picture about Alvin York; the first half of the movie is devoted to his life in the hills. I was surprised by how poor and backward it was. The second half of the movie concerns his training and fighting, which is portrayed with only minimal conflict with the other characters, unlike what seems standard today. Dave Kehr dislikes the portrayal of the war, which he says "degenerates quickly and grotesquely (cf the 'turkey shoot' finale)." Admittedly the movie is pro-war, but hardly in a bloodthirsty way; York is only able to shoot at the enemy when he realizes not shooting will cost more lives. The "turkey shoot" simply harks back to his skill as a marksman back in the Tennessee hills; York is hardly triumphal about it as shown by his unwillingness to give a number to how many of the enemy he killed. It also is much less ironic with less conflict between characters than we see these days.

The next day, Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) with Robert Donat in the title role for which he won an Oscar, beating out Clark Gable for GWTW. This made an interesting contrast. Even though this was from only two years earlier than Sergeant York, it seems like ages; I'm tempted to say it actually captured some of the "Great War" ethos, while Sergeant York was really just a WWII film in disguise. When the war reaches the school, Mr. Chips puts far more emphasis on how many of his boys are lost than on how important it is to fight the Germans. Or was it because this was filmed in the days of appeasement? Finally, when Chips goes hiking in the Austrian mountains, and the following dialog takes place:

Chipping: What extraordinary ideas come into one's head up here!
Katherine: It's the altitude.
Chipping: Do you experience a sort of exhilaration?
Katherine: Definitely.
Chipping: As though we owned the mountain.
Katherine: To put it mildly.
Chipping: We're pretty superior persons.
Katherine: We're gods.
Chipping: Up here, there's no time. No growing old. Nothing lost.
Katherine: We're young.
Chipping: We believe in ourselves.
Katherine: We have faith in the future.
Chipping: It must be the altitude.

The novel that was the basis for Goodbye, Mr. Chips was written by James Hilton, who also wrote Lost Horizon.