If Days of Heaven (1978) made Richard Gere a serious young actor to watch, Yanks (1979) showed what he could do with quiet. John Schlesinger’s Second World War drama is not a film about battles. It is a film about waiting, about strangers arriving in a small place, and about love affairs that begin knowing they may not last. Gere plays Matt Dyson, an American sergeant stationed in northern England, and his performance — restrained, decent, and quietly heartbroken — is the film’s emotional anchor.
The Story
Yanks is set in 1943 and 1944, in a Lancashire town in the north of England, where American troops are billeted before the D-Day landings. The title comes from the nickname the British gave to American servicemen, and the film is interested in the collision of two cultures: confident, well-supplied young Americans arriving in a country worn down by years of war, rationing, and loss.
The film follows three overlapping romances. Matt Dyson, played by Gere, falls in love with Jean Moreton, played by Lisa Eichhorn, an Englishwoman whose fiancé is serving overseas. Their relationship is tender and tentative, shaped by the knowledge that Jean is already committed to another man, and by the uncertainty of what Matt’s future holds. A second story follows Sergeant John, played by William Devane, and Helen, played by Vanessa Redgrave, an older, married woman whose husband is away at war. A third follows a young American private, played by Chick Vennera, and a young Englishwoman, played by Rachel Roberts.
Schlesinger does not hurry these stories. He lets them unfold in pubs, in dance halls, on walks through the town, and in the small, awkward moments of people from different worlds trying to understand each other. The war is always present — in the uniforms, in the news, in the departures — but it is rarely shown directly. The drama is in what the characters cannot say, and in the choices they make when they know time is short.
Matt Dyson: Decency Under Pressure
Matt is, in many ways, the opposite of the charismatic troublemaker Gere had played in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and the restless Bill of Days of Heaven. He is a thoughtful, courteous young man, a sergeant who takes his responsibilities seriously and who falls in love not with a grand gesture but with attention and care. Gere plays him without showiness. He listens. He waits. He tries to do the right thing, even when doing the right thing means accepting that Jean may return to her fiancé.
That restraint is what makes the performance work. In a film full of accents, uniforms, and period detail, Gere does not try to steal scenes. Instead, he lets Matt’s feelings build slowly: the first, slightly formal conversations with Jean; the growing ease between them; the pain when the reality of her engagement, and of his likely departure for combat, cannot be ignored. It is a romantic performance in the classic sense, but it is also a moral one. Matt is a man who understands that love, in wartime, is not only about desire but about consequence.
Lisa Eichhorn, as Jean, is his equal in the film. Their scenes together have a naturalness that avoids the clichés of the wartime romance. They talk, they laugh, they misunderstand each other, and they try again. The film’s refusal to give them a simple happy ending is part of its honesty: Schlesinger is interested in how people behave when they know that happiness may be temporary, and in the dignity of choosing kindness anyway.
John Schlesinger and a Different Kind of War Film
Yanks was directed by John Schlesinger, the British director of Darling (1965), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). By the late 1970s, Schlesinger was known for intimate, character-driven films, and Yanks fits that pattern. The screenplay, by Colin Welland and Walter Bernstein, was based on Welland’s own memories of Americans stationed in Britain during the war, and the film carries that sense of lived detail: the dances, the slang, the misunderstandings about tea, money, and manners.
The film was shot on location in England, and its production design — by Brian Morris — and its cinematography — by Dick Bush — give the Lancashire town a damp, lived-in reality. The streets are narrow, the pubs are smoky, and the countryside is green and grey rather than picturesque. That realism matters, because Yanks is a film about ordinary people, not about heroes. The American soldiers are not presented as liberators in a grand sense; they are young men far from home, spending money they have and time they may not keep.
The score, by Richard Rodney Bennett, is understated, and Schlesinger’s direction is patient. He allows scenes to breathe, and he trusts his actors to convey feeling without melodrama. The result is a war film that is, in its own way, more radical than many combat films of its era: it suggests that the most important battles of the war were fought not on beaches, but in the small decisions people made about loyalty, love, and home.
Reception and Reputation
Yanks was not a major commercial success on its release in 1979, and it has often been overlooked in discussions of both Schlesinger’s career and Gere’s. Critics at the time were divided: some praised its sensitivity and its performances, while others found it slow. In retrospect, however, the film’s patience looks like a strength. It belongs to a tradition of British and American war films that are interested in the home front — in the people who waited, and in the strangers who arrived — rather than in combat alone.
For Gere, Yanks was an important step between Days of Heaven and American Gigolo (1980). It proved that he could play a straightforward, sympathetic leading man, and that he could hold a film without relying on the dangerous edge that had defined his earliest roles. The very next year, American Gigolo would make him a star, and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) would make him a romantic leading man of the first rank. Yanks shows the quieter foundation on which that stardom was built.
Why It Endures
What endures about Yanks is its tenderness. It does not sentimentalise the past, and it does not pretend that the arrival of the Americans was simple or purely welcome. The British characters are wary, proud, and sometimes resentful; the Americans are generous and sometimes clumsy. The film understands both sides, and it understands that love, in such circumstances, is both a refuge and a risk.
Gere’s Matt Dyson embodies that understanding. He is a young man who knows he may be sent to fight and possibly to die, and who loves anyway — carefully, honestly, and without demanding more than Jean can give. It is a performance that asks little of the audience and gives a great deal in return, and it remains one of the most affecting of Gere’s early career. In a filmography full of larger, louder roles, Matt Dyson stands out precisely because he is so quiet.