A Film Canon

 

 

A morality play disguised as a biopic, Sergeant York is structured around two conversions - from Satan to Christ, and from conscientious objection to military decoration; that is, from the Christian Bible to the American Bible, and its third testament of national history - "the story of a whole people's struggle for freedom, from the very beginning until now", initiated by Daniel Boone's sojourn in the Tennessee "wilderness", and culminating with a society in which conscientious objection is possible, such that York's paradoxical gesture is to fight for the right not to fight. This clarifies Gary Cooper's trademark noble hick as antitype of both Christ and Boone, as evinced in his elevation and intensification of the vernacular to a liturgical pitch (the most eloquent English is in fact spoken by captured German troops), as well as his topographical, or at least agricultural, conception of mission: "So that's what the Lord done said to Cain when he done killed Abel. It was a way of telling him that he wouldn't get no crops no more." From this perspective, it makes sense that the revelation that prompts York's second, crucial conversion should be effected by a gust of wind from his beloved valley, and that Hawks should construe no-man's land as a mere extension of this valley, as if to conflate World War I with Boone's mythological tribulations, and the problematic act of killing men with the bucolic wholesomeness of the turkey hunt, their common denominator a transcendent marksmanship that incorporates the life of its target into the fantastic vision of American pastoral that concludes the narrative, foreshadowed in the local pastor's (Walter Brennan) invocation of Joshua 14:9: "And Moses swore on that day, saying 'Surely the land on which your foot has trodden shall be an inheritance for you and your children forever, because you have wholeheartedly followed the Lord my God.'"