Through the eyes of Sam Gifford in The day the Century Ended: his vision of World War II in contrast to that adopted by American war cinema
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/tlc.6.2024.15803Keywords:
Francis Irby Gwaltney, Norman Mailer, Between Heaven and Hell, The Naked and the Dead, Richard Fleischer, Raoul Walsh, World War II, Battle of LuzonAbstract
This paper explores how the novel The Day the Century Ended, by Francis Irby Gwaltney, provides such a realistic view of World War II by refusing to glorify the army and revealing a psychology of military and political figures difficult to digest, especially today, given their likeness to those of the present. Through film and literary analysis, the paper suggests that Gwaltney was inspired by his fellow writer Norman Mailer when creating his novel's main character, Sam Gifford, and not only when imagining the soldier Bernard L. Meleski as believed until now. The novel’s cinematographic adaptation managed to dodge the rigid American censors by employing a language which neither critics nor the army were able to understand.
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