I watched two old movies today from 1941. The first, "Here Comes Mister Jordan," was remade in 1978 as "Heaven Can Wait," with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in the starring roles. For anyone familiar with the remake, it was recognizably the same movie, with the main difference being that in the original movie, Joe Pendleton was a boxer, but in the remake, he was the quarterback on the Los Angeles Rams. I really liked "Heaven Can Wait," and I'd never seen "Here Comes Mister Jordan" before, but I liked it as well.
The second movie, which just finished, was "Sergeant York," a biopic about a man from the backwoods of Tennessee who finds religion, then is drafted into the Army in World War I. At first he tries to claim conscientious objector status, but after talking with his unit's commanding officer and some serious soul-searching, he decides that sometimes it's necessary to fight to defend your country. Sergeant Alvin York is played by Gary Cooper, and he won an Oscar for his portrayal. The high point of the picture is when Sergeant York and a handful of men capture a bunch of Germans in the trenches, and then when another group of Germans turns their machine gun on Sergeant York's men, he single-handedly kills about 20 of them and captures the rest, a total of 132 of the enemy. For his valor in charging the machine gun nest, Sergeant York received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Spotted in the credits: A very young (15- or 16-year-old) June Lockhart played Alvin York's younger sister, Rosie.
