Critics reviews

Because some of its successors are reckoned to be pacifist and because it spouts a winking "War Is Hell" posture, WHAT PRICE GLORY? is sometimes described as an anti-war film... But to truly be an 'anti' anything, WHAT PRICE GLORY? would first need a thought, any thought, in its head and mighty good luck finding one. The battle sequences are impressive, but the most durable part of WHAT PRICE GLORY? proved to be the skirt-chasing, he-man brawling debauchery.

Walsh depicts two battlefield campaigns, one impressionistic and devastating, which kills off the majority of the men in the company, and the other hallucinatory and horrific, with an outburst of bombardments that turn night into a hellish day. The military, in Walsh's view, is both the best and the worst of a man's world—as though the unfortunate fact of warfare were all that spoils a good war.

A steady stream of roughhouse pirouettes, yet once the characters hit the trenches Walsh composes as fiercely as Griffith with bayonet and barbed wire. (One panorama of relentless explosions tears into the barrelhouse atmosphere like flickers of Nash's The Mule Track.)