--- title: "Sergeant York" year: 1941 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/sergeant-york" fi1m_score: 66 critics_score: 62 critics_reviews: 6 published: "2026-09-20T00:39:11.340114+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T00:39:25.480684+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Sergeant York (1941) Directed by Howard Hawks · 2h 14m · MPA NR · War, Drama, History **Fi1m score: 66** · Critics 62 from 6 reviews *In a sentence:* Gary Cooper is a better hell-raiser than saint, and the film knows it for exactly one hour > Howard Hawks’s biography of the Tennessee farm boy who became a hero of the Great War is warm, handsome and honest for its first hour, and a sermon for most of its second. Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan keep it watchable throughout. ## Synopsis Tennessee, before America has joined the Great War. In the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf, Alvin C. York (Gary Cooper) drinks, brawls and shoots his initials into a tree with his friends Ike Botkin (Ward Bond) and Buck Lipscomb (Noah Beery Jr.), while his mother (Margaret Wycherly) keeps his supper warm and Pastor Rosier Pile (Walter Brennan) prays for him. He sees Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie) and decides he needs bottomland to be worth her. He works night and day to raise the price and puts his rifle, the best in the valley, to work in a shooting match for the rest. When the land is sold from under him, he sets off to settle it, and something on the road changes his mind. ## Review Howard Hawks tells the story of Alvin C. York, the Tennessee mountaineer who asked to be excused from the Great War on religious grounds and came home from it the best-known American soldier of the war. York himself is among the credited writers, and the film treats his life the way a Sunday-school teacher treats a parable: here is a wild boy, here is how he was saved, here is what the saving was for. It opened in the summer of 1941, months before the United States entered the war, and it is not shy about which side of that argument it is on. For an hour it is a warm, funny, plainly acted film about a poor valley. Then it puts on a uniform. Cooper plays York as a long, slow, dangerous boy who drinks and brawls with Ike Botkin (Ward Bond) and Buck Lipscomb (Noah Beery Jr.) and rides home at dawn to a mother who has kept his supper warm. Margaret Wycherly plays Mother York with a handful of lines, a woman who says little and misses nothing. Walter Brennan’s Pastor Rosier Pile sells Alvin his goods by day and preaches at him by night, and Brennan does both with the same amused patience, as if he had read the last page already. Joan Leslie’s Gracie is the reason Alvin wants the bottomland, and Leslie is quick and bright enough to make a person out of a part written as a prize. We were moved more than we expected, and it was the land that did it. Alvin arrives with the money he has worked himself to the bone for and is told it has gone to someone else. Cooper’s face does not change; he asks to have it said again. He does not shout and he does not look angry, he simply stands in the doorway being told that all of it was for nothing, and the stillness is worse than any speech would have been. Sol Polito shoots the valley in soft greys, with lamplight in the cabins and a painted haze over the hills, so that nothing looks quite real and it hardly matters, because the people do. The church is where Hawks lets his crowd loose, and the congregation singing Alvin towards the front pew is the film’s best set piece. Max Steiner’s score works the hymn tunes hard. He has a way of arriving at the feeling a beat before Cooper does, and we would rather Cooper got there first. Then the draft. Alvin will not kill, the Army will not excuse him, and Major Buxton (Stanley Ridges) sets out to argue him round with a history of the United States and some leave to think it over. Four men are credited with the screenplay, John Huston, Harry Chandlee, Abem Finkel and Howard Koch, and this is the stretch where you can count them. Every scene is an argument with two sides and a foregone winner. George Tobias’s “Pusher” Ross, a New Yorker who has never seen a tree that was not in a park, is the one piece of barracks comedy Hawks allows himself, and every scene he is in breathes. France is well made and oddly calm. Hawks and his editor William Holmes cut the attack cleanly, the mud is mud and the guns are loud, but the film never once lets us think York might die, and so the one sequence that ought to be frightening is not. His marksmanship, established at length in Tennessee, pays off in a way we will not describe. The last twenty minutes are ceremony, speeches and handshakes and men in good suits, and we watched them with the restlessness of people who have stopped expecting anything to happen. Hawks had made [*His Girl Friday*](https://film.one/film/his-girl-friday) the year before, with everybody talking over everybody at speed and nobody making a speech. Here everyone finishes a sentence and then starts another. It is his most respectable film, and his stiffest. One tagline promised missiles, jets and tanks and assured us that it was still “the guy with guts and a gun” who wins the war; that is more or less the film’s case, and it makes it with more grace than the poster did. See it for the valley, for Brennan, and for Cooper in that doorway. It runs 134 minutes, and the ones that count are all in the first sixty. *Fi1m score 66, published 20 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics like Sergeant York, and the praise gathers around Gary Cooper. Reviewers old and new agree he is well cast as the gaunt Tennessee mountaineer who trades his wildness for religion and then, with reluctance, for war. The reviews also warm to the film’s picture of Southern backwoods life, which one calls the best the screen had yet managed, and Walter Brennan’s pastor draws a good word. Even the sceptics grant the battle scenes a feel for the pain and squalor of the trenches. The spread is wide, and it splits by date. The 1941 notices call it honest, dignified biography, with more care for character than incident. The later writers are far cooler: Time Out finds it Hawks’s most conventional major work, picturesque and poorly paced, and Slant calls it a dated propaganda piece, rigid where the director is usually loose. Empire sits between, admiring the camaraderie among men and noting that Hawks keeps the folksiness out of the war scenes. ### Reviews we read (6) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (90/100, inferred): The film is biography at its best, with more attention paid to character and background than to incident. Gary Cooper is perfectly cast as the backwoodsman who masters his wildness, and Walter Brennan is splendid as the village pastor and storekeeper. [Read](https://variety.com/1940/film/reviews/sergeant-york-1200413514/) - **The New Yorker**, John C. Mosher (80/100, inferred): The film offers an enriched picture of Alvin York and his world, with the best screen depiction yet of Southern backlands life and its poor, humorous struggles. Cooper overcomes any resemblance issues to portray a starved, tough, competent figure with the right drawl. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1941/07/05/1941-07-05-047-tny-cards-000008231) - **The New York Times** (75/100, inferred): It is a simple and dignified screen biography of the Tennessee mountaineer who set aside religious scruples for the greater good, an honest saga of a plain American full of humility and pride. Gary Cooper holds the picture together magnificently as the gaunt, clumsy yokel. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1941/07/03/archives/sergeant-york-a-sincere-biography-of-the-world-war-hero-makes-its-a.html) - **Empire**, David Parkinson (65/100, inferred): This is a classic Hawksian biopic of a reluctant hero whose religious conversion leads him to fight in World War I. The director excels at depicting camaraderie among dedicated men and avoids overly folksy tones in the war sequences. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/sergeant-york-review/) - **Slant Magazine**, Fernando F. Croce (30/100, inferred): The critic views the film as a dated propagandistic morality tale that is rigid where Hawks is usually loose, though it includes some splendid moments such as a convincing religious enlightenment scene. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/gary-cooper-the-signature-collection/) - **Time Out**, GA (30/100, inferred): The film is simultaneously Hawks' most respectable and most artistically conventional major work, with Gary Cooper engaging as the pacifist-turned-hero but the story lacking subversive wit and depth. Battle scenes stand out for their feel for the pain and squalor of war, though the film is often picturesque and poorly paced overall. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/sergeant-york) ## Details - **Director:** Howard Hawks - **Director:** Howard Hawks - **Screenplay:** Howard Koch, Abem Finkel, John Huston, Harry Chandlee - **Writer:** Alvin C. York - **Cinematography:** Sol Polito - **Editor:** William Holmes - **Music:** Max Steiner - **Producer:** Jesse L. Lasky, Hal B. Wallis, Howard Hawks - **Cast:** Gary Cooper as Alvin C. York; Walter Brennan as Pastor Rosier Pile; Joan Leslie as Gracie Williams; George Tobias as "Pusher" Ross; Stanley Ridges as Major Buxton; Margaret Wycherly as Mother York; Ward Bond as Ike Botkin; Noah Beery Jr. as Buck Lipscomb - **Runtime:** 2h 14m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 27 September 1941 - **Genres:** War, Drama, History - **Budget:** $1 million - **Box office:** $16 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xw4I67VP_U ## Where to watch in the US - Tubi: free, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AT, NZ, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1942: Best Art Direction, Black and White (nominated); Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (nominated); Best Director (nominated); Best Original Dramatic Score (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Sound (nominated); Best Supporting Actor (nominated); Best Supporting Actress (nominated); Best Writing, Original Screenplay (nominated); Best Actor (won); Best Film Editing (won) ## If you liked this - *Only Angels Have Wings* (1939): Hawks loose rather than respectable: men doing a dangerous job and not making speeches about it. - *Paths of Glory* (1957), Fi1m 93: The other Great War film about a man under orders, and it doubts everything this one believes. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/paths-of-glory.md) - *La Grande Illusion* (1937), Fi1m 92: Renoir’s prisoners of the same war, decent to one another across the wire. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/grand-illusion.md) - *Friendly Persuasion* (1956), Fi1m 72: Cooper again, a Quaker father, and a war his conscience will not let him join. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/friendly-persuasion.md) - *Hacksaw Ridge* (2016), Fi1m 77: A conscientious objector at the front, told with far more blood and rather less doubt. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/hacksaw-ridge.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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