[Boats]

What Price Glory
RE: https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-...es/price-glory

In this 1952 remake of Raoul Walsh’s 1926 comic drama, the director John Ford tells the same story—about two American officers wrangling over a woman while stationed in France in 1918, during the First World War—but the underlying subject of Ford’s film is the war that was raging at the time of the shoot, the Korean War. The short, raucous Captain Flagg (James Cagney) and the tall, raucous Sergeant Quirt (Dan Dailey) have been competitive friends for decades—Flagg wins the fights, Quirt gets the girls. Now, stationed in Bar-le-Duc, Flagg seems to have won the heart of Charmaine (Corinne Calvet), a café owner’s daughter. But, decimated in combat, the outfit receives a shipment of raw recruits and conscripts, some underage, whom the battle-hardened Quirt must mold into a fighting force and lead into the fray in just a few days. For Ford, the military training, discipline, courage, and wiles of a professional army—and the cruel pointlessness of the draft—are the center of the story. The patriotic sentiment of a corps marching crisply is harshly dispelled by the mortal struggle that awaits. Ford doesn’t stint on the horrors, or on their psychological effects; he gives Cagney some of the most terrifying scenes of masculine grief and post-traumatic crackup ever filmed.

— Richard Brody

In short: Definition of what price glory/fame. —used to suggest that glory/fame may not be worth what a person has to lose or give up in order to get it.