Between Heaven and Hell

Before the war Sam Gifford owned a cotton plantation in the South; an arrogant man, comfortable inside a system that ground down his sharecroppers, married to a colonel's daughter. When war comes he goes to the front as a sergeant with his National Guard unit. Unable to stand a lieutenant who fires on his own men, he strikes him, is reduced in rank and sent to a penal battalion. His new commanding officer is no better than the lieutenant. Richard Fleischer's film takes place in the Pacific and is interested less in the combat scenes than in the class difference inside the unit: the working-class privates Sam used to look down on are now in the same trench. Robert Wagner plays Sam and Broderick Crawford the commander of the penal battalion. The narrative presents the man's change as a lesson, which is the film's weakest side; against that, it shows arbitrary authority inside the army harshly for its period.