Shout by Tony Bates

Sergeant York 1941

Dreadfully long piece of unapologetic, sentimental propaganda. Hawks spends the entire first hour introducing York, first as a brash youngster quick to a-drinkin' and a-fightin' (never mind that Cooper was 40) and then as a devout churchgoer. We spend 55 minutes watching him trying to buy some land, then spend 5 minutes on a single-scene conversion that provides the fulcrum for the entire second half of the movie. The war scenes aren't much better, with some out-of-place comic relief from "Pusher", but it would all be fine, for me, if not for the mawkish and didactic morality at the heart of the film.

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