“Just a little walk in the warm Italian sun” provided the basic material for one of Milestone’s greatest films of the 1940s. To be precise, the “walk” in question spans the six miles covered to capture a modest, crumbling farmhouse. During the course of the walk, the implications of heroism, country, responsibility, and camaraderie are redefined.
After the paranoid and pathetic The Purple Heart (1944), which felt almost like an apology for the Communistic excesses of The North Star, Milestone’s fifth WWII film in a row was his most accurate depiction of military absurdity since All Quiet on the Western Front. The film looks remarkably modern, with its barren landscape so stripped down it feels like watching a Dreyer film. It’s a study of faces and the psychology of char­acters set against a faceless (but not vil­ified) enemy. It’s in keeping with Mile­stone’s method of combining realism and stylisation, the latter so extreme as to strain credibility. The film captures the most agonising aspect of every war: the long stretches of waiting for something to happen.
Robert Rossen’s script, based on a nov­el by Harry Brown, includes some of the most consistently memorable dialogue written in American cinema. It stays close to the bone, reflecting the sarcastic cyni­cism of soldiers under duress, when fear and self-loathing feed into each other.
It was Milestone who suggested that part of the soldiers’ experience be turned into ballads sung on the soundtrack. “I got the idea from my childhood in Rus­sia. Very often, in the town where I lived, you’d see war veterans on street corners who’d become troubadours.” The com­munist and soon-to-be-blacklisted Earl Robinson wrote the lyrics, which helped develop both the characters and the plot. Years later, Carl Foreman confessed to Milestone that he had lifted the idea of the ballad for High Noon.
A trace of A Walk in the Sun can be found in many war films that followed, emphasising the meaninglessness of combat and its unbearable pressures, leaving every­one with some sort of scar. In a way, in an unvarnished war film, everybody dies.

Ehsan Khoshbakht