Strong and Moving!

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Mickey Rooney received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in this movie which presents a small group of American soldiers in Italy in 1944. Three types of soldiers are presented here, based on their reactions to their first encounter with the German enemy while in Italy. Rooney is the energetic and a happy go-with-the-punches soldier. Wendell Corey is a fairly well balanced soldier but is unable to kill the enemy when he is faced with the possibility. Don Taylor is a superman in battle situations but has trouble when faced with normal human spiritual matters, no doubt stunted by his upbringing. Nicole Maurey is a local Italian prostitute, forced to sell herself for survival.

I remember seeing this at a drive-in back when it first came out with my cousin's family in Rochester. This is one of those films that really sticks with you. At the time however some of the more adult themes of the film went completely over my head.The Bold And The Brave focuses on three soldiers in the Italian campaign. Wendell Corey plays an amiable drifter type who in civilian life was a lawyer, but never practiced much law as he was married to a rich woman. He's not sure if he has the right stuff.Corey's best pal is Mickey Rooney who got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He's a cheerful extrovert who lives for his off duty moments. He's got a marvelous scene cleaning out the company in a crap game. In the end though, that truly does him in.Both are commanded by Don Taylor who is their uptight model GI Joe sergeant. In war he's great, but has some issues in his personal life. They call him preacher and it's suggested ever so gently that he's been celibate. Corey tries to fix him up with Nicole Maurey who also gives a great performance as a girl who does what she can to survive the war.The Bold And The Brave has for some reason been lost for years. Hopefully it will be broadcast and a new generation can appreciate a fine underrated classic.

I saw this on Mickey Rooney's 93rd (!) birthday. It's in some ways a typical mid 50s U.S. product: One of those titles popular at the time (The Bad And The Beautiful, The Proud And The Profane, etc.), a theme song (co-written by Rooney) played during the opening and end credits, and one of the dubious then trendy widescreen spinoffs, SuperScope (It is hard to judge how well it was used here as the only watcheable copy I was able to find is in the standard TV ratio.) The story of American foot soldiers in Italy in 1944 concentrates on three characters who have a certain amount of psychological depth in the (Oscar nominated) writing. Wendell Corey stars as a cynical, well off guy who's afraid to shoot but not surprisingly gets the courage in the well done climax to fire back and even destroy a German tank. Don Taylor's role is the most complex, as the sergeant Preacher, a hard taskmaster, sexually repressed, and unable to accept when he finally meets a woman that she has already been with others.But Rooney, nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar, has the show stealing big scene, as a gambling obsessed little dynamo, when he plays with dice in a tent full of other soldiers and scrambles for his scattered bills after the lights go out. In the combat scenes that finally come, an hour into the picture, when they go on recon patrol in a forest, he gets killed trying to retrieve some of these winnings.(The rock formations later in this scene are a giveaway that the movie was shot not in Italy but in Southern California.) Rooney's acting throughout is hyper, wound up, almost as if he were on pep pills during the shooting.Director Lewis Foster, based on his credits, looks worthy of further study.

I hadn't seen this since childhood; the moving climax stuck in my mind long after the ballad sung over the credits faded from memory. The crap game is somewhat replicated a few years later in the memorable Mickey Rooney-starring episode of COMBAT!: "Silver Service". Mickey brings the same self-effacing, self-sacrificing ebullience to the role of Harry White as he does to Dooley in The BOLD AND THE BRAVE... Louis Morgan says, on his blog: ''Mickey Rooney is an actor who is commonly derided by modern viewers for his Rooney mannerisms, and tendency to overact his parts. I must personally I have no animosity toward Rooney. Firstly he showed in The Human Comedy he is capable of giving a moving performance, secondly I personally never had a problem with his Rooneyisms. This is not to say that I do not understand people who do hold this animosity, Rooney certainly is an actor that if he rubs you the wrong way he probably really rubs you the wrong way. He simply does not annoy me in that way, although it most certainly is true that his performances tend to be better when they are further away from a typical Rooney performance than closer.''Highest recommendation!