1,001 Films: "The Battle of San Pietro" (1945)

The U.S. Army-commissioned half-hour documentary short The Battle of San Pietro displays the punchy storytelling its director John Huston would become known for in his fiction features (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), but also an emotionality mostly absent from the rest of the Huston filmography. Its remit was no more than to document a particular battle fought over the closing months of 1943 around an Italian valley crucial to the Allied advance, but Huston gives us a sense of the region's geography and climate, so we know what it's like to be marching through the valley's howling rain and wind, being shot at from both sides: as with the opening of Saving Private Ryan, we get as close as any viewer conceivably can to the experience of having lived through it.

It helps that the battle itself, in this retelling, adhered to a classical three-act structure: the Allies' initial attack was repelled - incurring heavy casualties, many of whom we see being carted away in body bags - and only when troop numbers were reinforced with the deployment of aerial, tank and parachute divisions (the film's never-more-valuable supporting players) could a fightback begin. In the meantime, the flares continue to explode, the bullets to ricochet, entire hillsides go up in smoke, and bodies come to fall in the corner of the eye, the merest hint of the vast sacrifices being made; it ends not with the mission-accomplished triumphalism one might expect of state-approved propaganda, but rather a dignified and moving reminder of the ordinary lives at stake in such conflicts, and of the hard gruntwork that would be essential, over the coming months, if victory was to be assured.

This is a fragment that has assumed more importance than Huston and his crew perhaps knew at the time. In movie terms, if this battle hadn't been fought and won, there would have been no Rome, Open City, that text so crucial to Italian neo-realism, so beloved of the French New Wave, so essential to the cinema's second half-century - a film whose images seem almost to be predicted here in its concluding shots of children and nursing mothers, rubble and restoration. Looked back on from the first decades of the 21st century, it's also fascinating to encounter a wartime documentary devoid of the neuroses inherent to, say, a Restrepo or Armadillo - but that may just be an indicator of the differences between pre-Vietnam photojournalism and post-Vietnam photojournalism, and between images that see just enough and those that have seen far too much. However you look at it, history was being made here.

The Battle of San Pietro is available to rent through lovefilm.com.