Fair for Its Day: Several of his films feature interracial romances (Joe Butterfly, The Quiet American, and Apache Rifles). Some of his westerns portray Native Americans in a sympathetic light, and even when they are antagonists, usually they are either shown to have legitimate grievances or are shown as being no worse than the white villains. Guns of Fort Petticoat also deserves brownie points for not making his female militia look too silly: there's a crisis, there's no men around to do the fighting, so the women step up to the plate with a minimum of complaining. Most of the insubordination comes from the fact that the Civil War is on and Murphy's a Union officer, while the women are Confederates.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: in the sixties, when his films were seen as out-of-date in the States, he remarked that they were still popular in Germany. He seemed amused by the irony. The film version of To Hell and Back was very popular in Japan, apparently for its hero's warrior ethos and devotion to his younger siblings. His films were also popular in France, England (where the pulp western novelist J. T. Edson based a character on him) and Australia. Even today, a Region 2 fan of Audie Murphy has a much better selection of his westerns available on dvd than a Region 1 fan does.
Memetic Badass: in his own time, he was certainly seen this way-most of his films assume that the viewer knows perfectly well that the bad guys are being complete and utter morons when they choose to tangle with him. Plus nearly everyone who served with him had a story of his courage under fire to tell, and nearly everybody who worked with him in the film industry had a story of him punching out or intimidating someone who was acting nasty to him or his friends. Today, he's not really seen as a Memetic Badass, because he's not very well-known anymore, and perhaps because people feel that there is something unseemly in making up Chuck Norris Facts about someone who went Beyond the Impossible so many times in real life and paid such a heavy price in physical and emotional suffering.
So Average Its Okay: there are very few aggressively bad Audie Murphy movies; they tend to be either unambitious but pretty good, ambitious but flawed, or this trope. Part of his obscurity today is perhaps due to the lack of So Bad It's Good movies on his resume.
Vindicated by History: Murphy did not care for how his tv series Whispering Smith turned out, and contemporary reviews were scathing, but the people who've reviewed it on Amazon.com often describe it as a pretty decent old-timey entertainment. The French dvd company Sidonis seems determined to do this to his b-westerns: they've released a number of them with introductions by a film historian.