. . . DR. STRANGELOVE . . . and CATCH-22, director John Ford's WHEN WILLIE COMES MARCHING HOME also presages FORREST GUMP with its title character's four days of peripatetic perambulations full of war-time serendipity transforming an unwilling "slacker" into an unwitting military hero. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than brave, and "Sgt. Bill" sleepwalks through most of his booze-filled odyssey. Never has a soldier been ordered to down so much booze for his country. Wine. Rum. Cognac. Bourbon. Sherry. The list of hooch goes on and on. When sober, Bill is a master gunner, playing the trombone, piano, and singing for fun. When drunk, he thinks the Browns are a baseball team, not from Cleveland but St. Louis, residing incongruously in the American League, and implausibly tied with a Yankee squad bereft of Joe DiMaggio, to which a lonely nation cannot turn. (If captured by fellow Americans during the Battle of the Bulge, Bill would have been shot as a would-be Nazi infiltrator for answers such as these. Fortunately for him, the French are not so picky for accuracy.)
Review of When Willie Comes Marching Home
