Les Voyeurs #86 – Les Arnaques

Diffusion le : jeudi 5 novembre 2009 à 18h sur RGO / vendredi 6 novembre 2009 à 18h sur Radio 16.
Rediffusion le samedi 7 novembre 2009 à 10h sur RGO.
En téléchargement pendant une semaine ici.
Et en écoute permanente là.

Actualité

Avant-premières aux Arcades : A l’origine de Xavier Giannoli mardi 10 novembre à 19h30 (tarif unique : 5€) 2012 de Roland Emmerich mardi 10 novembre à 21h30 (tarif unique : 5€)
Aux Arcades d’Alès : Mademoiselle Chambon de Stéphane Brizé, Irène d’Alain Cavalier, This is it de Kenny Ortega en VO, Mission G de Hoyt Yeatman en 3D, Micmacs à tire-larigot de Jean Pierre Jeunet.
David Lynch présente un documentaire sur son film Inland Empire et l’Interview project au Festival Les Inrocks Dimanche 8 novembre au Comptoir général.
La Révélation en avant première le 6 novembre à Bordeaux, St Étienne… Sortie en février 2010.
Raymond Depardon en Languedoc-Roussillon : dernière étape de cette opération commencée le 14 mars dernier au 27e Festival Cinéma d’Alès – Itinérances du 6 novembre au 31 janvier à Montpellier. Le programme ici.
24e Festival International du Cinéma d’Animation de Baillargues du 8 au 25 novembre a comme invité d’honneur Bill Plympton. Le programme ici
Thor de Kenneth Branagh : Odin sera joué par Anthony Hopkins il rejoint sur ce projet Natalie Portman et Robert de Niro.
Action de la fédération nationale des cinémas français “Pour manifester leur vive inquiétude auprès des pouvoirs publics face à leur situation économique dégradée, les 2100 cinémas de France s’unissent pour une opération symbolique en éteignant leurs enseignes lumineuses le mercredi 4 novembre de 18h à 19h” Article de La Marseillaise du 6 novembre ici

Dossier de la semaine : Les Arnaques

Arnaques de voleurs
A l’origine de Xavier Giannoli sortie mercredi 11 novembre
Neuf reines de Fabian Bielinsky
Cash d’Éric Besnard

David Mamet : passionné par l’arnaque
Engrenages (Bienvenue au drive-in)
La prisonnière espagnole

Faites vos jeux :
Las Vegas 21 de Robert Luketic
Maverick de Richard Donner
Les Joueurs de John Dahl
L’Inconnu de Las Vegas de Lewis Milestone

Ocean’s 11 (et 12 et 13) de Steven Soderberg
L’Arnaque de Georges Roy Hill
Les Arnaqueurs de Stephen Frears

Guy Ritchie : arnaques alambiquées
Arnaques, crimes et botanique
Snatch : Tu braques ou tu raques
Revolver
RocknRolla

La bande originale de la semaine :

Générique par Miles Davis.
Extrait de la bande originale du film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957) de Louis Malle.

Chronique : La Carte postale sétoise

John Huston de Patrick Brion éd. La Martinière

Musique :
Miserable lie par The Smiths

Extraits :
A l’origine
La Prisonnière espagnole
Maverick
Ocean 11
L’Arnaque
Snatch

Présentation : Erik Antolin, Jérôme Bauzon
Carte Postale : Jan Jouvert
En quarantaine : Cédric Cance
Réalisation : Jérémie Adrian

Year: 1933
Director: Lewis Milestone
Cast: Al Jolson, Madge Evans, Frank Morgan, Harry Langdon, Chester Conklin, Edgar Connor

TCM has been doing a wonderfully showcase this month on Thursday nights on movies about the Great Depression. There are still some wonderful movies coming up, like Gold Diggers of 1933, Faithless, and American Madness. During the first week, they aired this rarely seen on TCM gem, Hallelujah I’m a Bum. It’s not hard to see the purpose of this movie, the glorification of homelessness during a time when a fair deal of the population of NYC was homeless.

Al Jolson plays Bumper, a hobo who happily lives in Central Park with his fellow homeless friends. He enjoys living outside and doesn’t even attempt to get a job. He’s also buddies Mayor John Hastings (Frank Morgan). Hastings is in a clandestine relationship with June (Madge Evans), but after an argument June takes a dive off of a bridge. Bumper fishes her out of the river, but she’s lost her memory and has no idea who she is or where she came from. Not knowing that she’s the mayor’s girl, Bumper falls hard for her.

In New York City during the Depression, Central Park really was the go-to for people who were out of work and without homes. It was the main location for many of the Hoovervilles, and it also served as a home to people like Bumper, who preferred to simply sleep outside. With so much hardship and the lack of homes in the city, it was only natural that the studios over in Hollywood would try to make some movies to lift the spirits of those people. Hallelujah I’m a Bum is easily the most blatant of these types of movies. Bumper and his friends are all homeless, yes, but they’re happy and they’re loving it. Their lives are carefree, especially when you compare them to the lives of the wealthy, like the mayor and his dramatic romantic problems. The “Gee, isn’t poverty swell!” tone to the film may induce some eye-rolling today, but when you remember the time it was made, it’s actually kind of sweet.

It stars Al Jolson, so it’s naturally a musical film. The songs aren’t exactly memorable, but they’re prevalent throughout the film (I’d say more than half, maybe even about two thirds of the movie is sung) which gives the movie a strange but infectious rhythm and pace. It also makes what could be really depressing (not just the homelessness problem, but also June’s attempted suicide) more charming than sad.

Jolson was  likable enough in the lead role, but he never really had that leading man charisma when it came to talkies. Frank Morgan, though, was wonderful as he always was. He really was one of the most dependable character actors of the studio era, and this role shows his range. In so many of his films he’s sort of a sweet, but bumbling guy. It’s nice to see him play someone smart and kind of suave. And then of course there’s Madge Evans. How I adore Madge Evans. She’s simply one of the most charming and likable actresses in Hollywood history. And she’s just as charming and wonderful here as she always is.

Hallelujah I’m a Bum isn’t a conventional movie from the 1930s, from the music, to the pacing, to the ending, but it’s certainly a good movie, especially when viewed in the context in which is was made.

By Katie Richardson

]]> http://jessesublett.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/art-blog-6/ Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:45:23 +0000 jessesublett http://jessesublett.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/art-blog-6/

falling in love again, sketch

falling in love again

catfish etouffe on biscuits at Hoover's Home Cooking

Ernest Borgnine, from McHale's Navy to Marty to From Here to Eternity

Your faithful blogger at Musee Picasso in Paris. France.

Speaking of that feeling, on my last trip to the downtown library, I was relieved to see myself over in the jazz CD section. You see, the last time I was there, I wasn’t there. What I mean is, they had taken down my “READ” poster from last year and put up the new guy. Sarah Bird was still in the same old place, but I was nowhere. No, I didn’t complain to anyone. But then I went back, and there I was, with a window view and everything, right above the jazz rack. That’s cool.

Homem feio da porra

But I have a confession to make.
Do you know, I think I like Mason as much as Errol Flynn?

Diálogo de Festim Diabólico (Rope, Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Já vou dizendo: nunca fui grande fã dele, ao menos não em virtude dos filmes, mas o mito Flynn é impossível ser desprezado, afinal, só tendo muita força de vontade para desprezar um tipo desses. O homem era sensacional, além de ser uma ode ambulante ao falo (o que é bem difícil de esquecer), Flynn seria o companheiro de boteco ideal para qualquer pessoa bem humorada. Era bonitão (lindo e gostosérrimo, na verdade) e carismático, foi muso por vários anos de Raoul Walsh e Michael Curtiz, era um homem inteligentíssimo e culto, tinha uma vida pessoal muito divertida, intrigante e ao mesmo tempo muito trágica (acho que ninguém em período algum de Hollywood foi mais espetacular do que ele) e, apesar do estigma de bonito e apetitoso eclipsar totalmente qualquer ato dramático, fazia o que era preciso além do que os detratores possam dizer.
E claro, a perspectiva talvez seja variante, mas não seria nenhum exagero dizer que Flynn pode ser o maior símbolo sexual do cinema, ninguém foi mais associado única e exclusivamente a sexo do que ele e não digo apenas dentro do mainstream, mas incluindo até astros pornôs, simplesmente porque este homem era um símbolo fálico de 1,90 de altura em todo seu esplendor e glória. Flynn não possuía um pênis, ele era o pênis em pessoa.
Então que fique aqui um top dos filmes onde vi Mr Flynn nos honrar com sua presença umidificante.

1- O Ídolo do Público (Gentleman Jim, Raoul Walsh, 1942)Amm umm… então tá. Do que eu estava falando mesmo? Ah, sim, de mais uma das obras primas de Raoul Walsh.
De todos os filmes em que Flynn trabalhou, este era o seu favorito, o porquê é fácil ver, Errol está no auge: do sucesso, da forma física, dos melhores desempenhos e… solteiro! Bom, da forma física só na aparência, pois durante as filmagens ele teve o seu primeiro princípio de ataque cardíaco, com apenas 33 anos, mesmo com esse fator de risco ele continuou fazendo as próprias cenas de um esporte que dominava desde a adolescência. Devo concordar com Flynny, também é o meu favorito e nem é porque o homem passa boa parte do filme sem camisa e trajando ceroulas, mas especialmente por ser a primeira grande obra prima sobre boxe, título este que particularmente creio só ter sido equiparado quando um tal de Martin Scorsese tomou o cinturão para si nos anos 80.
Uma cena é especialmente impagável, onde Flynn e Jack Carson estão no teatro ridicularizando a maneira de atuar de um outro lutador chamando-no de ham, isso nada mais é do que uma brilhante auto-referência, Flynn e Carson eram os mais encrenqueiros, bêbados e exagerados atores sob contrato da Warner na época, ambos eram identificados como ham actors e nem todo mundo tinha estômago para trabalhar com eles, Flynn chegou a ganhar por duas vezes o prêmio Sour Apple de ator menos cooperativo de Hollywood. Gentleman Jim como um tôdo faz grande paralelo entre a arte e estilo de atuar com a arte e estilo de lutar, Walsh bate na tecla de que cada estilo dá a contribuição para se alcançar um novo patamar e isso soa lindamente se refletido em Flynn.

2- Fugitivos do Inferno (Desperate Journey, Raoul Walsh, 1942)Ôpa, esse é filmaço! Dá até para arriscar um palpite de que este trabalho é o pai de certos filmes cultuados dos anos 60, tais como Os Doze Condenados e Fugindo do Inferno, é mantido o mesmo clima, sobretudo o bom humor, mas o que o faz ainda melhor é um distanciamento temporal que poucos os filmes de guerra dos anos 40 possuíam e que o gênero só reconquistaria a partir dos anos 50. Também é a prova do porquê Walsh é o maior diretor de cinema de aventura desde os anos 20, a ação não deixa de nos empolgar um só minuto, a dinâmica dos atores é perfeita, as situações são engraçadíssimas e não há o ranço propagandista emotivo que se via usualmente nos filmes da época. Desperate Journey mostra também o quanto Spielberg foi influenciado pelo cinema de Walsh, mas este é um assunto para uma outra hora…

3- Capitão Blood (Captain Blood, Michael Curtiz, 1935)Coisa fofa da mãe. Aqui vemos o porque nenhuma mulher da Hollywood dos anos 30 podia ser vista ao lado de Errol Flynn e continuar com a reputação intacta: o homem era irresistível e faz por merecer a expressão atemporal In Like Flynn. É em Capitão Blood que tudo realmente começa para Flynn: é o primeiro filme que protagoniza em Hollywood, o primeiro ao lado de Miss Havilland e o ponto em que ele surge de total desconhecido que só fazia pontas para um dos maiores astros dos anos 30 e 40. E Michael Curtiz nos legou alguns grandes exemplos de aventura e ação, apesar de ser mais lembrado por Casablanca, é com os filmes ao lado de Flynn que Curtiz se mostra capaz de manter o enfadado público atual eletrizado com seus filmes de 75 anos atrás e, cá entre nós, Capitão Blood é o meu filme de pirata favorito. E que bonito – tudo que Flynny e Douglas Fairbanks construíram durante o século XX foi destruído pelo Johnny Depp na última década. Que bonito.

4- Um Punhado de Bravos (Objective, Burma! Raoul Walsh, 1945)Raoul Walsh foi mesmo o molde para todos os filmes de guerra dos últimos 70 anos, sobretudo em Fuller e Spielberg, a prova está documentada em cada sequência de Um Punhado de Bravos. Prova maior ainda é o quanto Errol Flynn rendia nas mãos de Walsh, ele era um ator completamente distinto sob o comando do diretor e vai ver por isso o filme começa com vários soldados cheios de frescuras, fazendo as unhas, lavando seus collants (!?!), um anuncio que os tempos de Flynn usando collant tinham terminado e aqui deveria se comportar feito macho.
Um lance histórico bacana é o quanto os ingleses e australianos ficaram putos com esse filme, por fazer parecer que os americanos ganharam toda a guerra sozinhos, pois a tal da Operação Birmânia foi predominantemente composta por soldados da Inglaterra e Austrália. Nada como manipular pessoas através do cinema…

5- As Aventuras de Robin Hood (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Michael Curtiz/William Keighley, 1938)Ah, todos queles homens alegres e coloridos! Sabe como são as coisas, o povo ainda não estava acostumado com cinema em technicolor, então exagerava um pouco. É fato: Robin Hood será associado eternamente a imagem de Errol Flynn e seu collant verde, ele não foi o primeiro e nem o último que encarnou a personagem, mas de alguma forma Flynn é único e todos agradecemos por Jimmy Cagney não ter ficado com o papel.
Robin Hood foi o primeiro filme que vi com Mr Flynn e é mesmo impossível não cair nas graças dele (ah, esses homens hiperativos!), sobretudo se lembrarmos daquela memorável luta de sombras, a qual futuramente seria reprisada em The Sea Hawk com deslumbrante fotografia em preto e branco, enquanto a trilha sonora de Erich Wolfgang Korngold climatiza tudo e um pouco mais em ambos os casos. Também nunca esquecerei da primeira vez que vi Flynn quando eu era criança: vi um tipo dando tchauzinho para o Pernalonga em Rabbit Hood (Chuck Jones, 1949) e só anos mais tarde, já na adolescência, finalmente soube que aquele cara era o Errol Flynn!
É durante as filmagens de Robin Hood que Miss Havilland decide começar a torturar Mr Flynn para que este deixe sua esposa para ficar com ela, iniciativa esta que causou problemas no collant dele (se é que me entendem), como a própria Havilland confessou no documentário Adventures of Errol Flynn.

6- O Intrépido General Custer (They Died with Their Boots On, Raoul Walsh, 1941)Com um título original desses não tem como não sair correndo para ver o filme, se ouvirmos uma das mais famosas trilhas do western clássico (a composta por Max Steiner) fica mesmo impossível resistir. Flynn e Walsh se unem pela primeira vez e não mais desgrudam tanto profissional quanto socialmente, adotando uma postura de irmão mais velho e caçula, mesmo Walsh tendo idade para ser pai de Flynny. Deve ser por isso que gosto mais da parceria Flynn-Walsh do que a Flynn-Curtiz, a presença de Flynn fluía melhor nos filmes de Walsh, é como se falassem a mesma língua e não estou fazendo piada com as dificuldades notórias de Curtiz com a língua inglesa, mas porque era visível na tela a afinidade dos dois malucos.
Numa das inúmeras cinebios de personagens históricas banhadas de muita licença poética e pouca realidade e que só a Hollywood dos anos dourados sabia nos proporcionar, vemos Flynny num dos seus mais dilacerantes momentos profissionais: a cena de despedida entre Custer e sua esposa é também a cena de despedida da parceria romântica entre Flynn e Havilland, era alí que acabava um dos mais entusiasmantes casais da tela.

7- Sangue e Prata (Silver River, Raoul Walsh, 1948)E a bíblia vai ao velho oeste. Último filme oficial do duo Flynn-Walsh, é um imenso western do Walsh e um tremendo trabalho do Flynn, relembrando os anos em que foi garimpeiro na Papua Nova Guiné. Conta a história da ascenção e derrocada do império da prata no velho oeste, onde Flynny assume uma sensacional posição de anti-herói com caráter duvidoso ao encarnar o rei da prata, a versão mais argêntica e sossegada do Daniel Plainview.

8- Olhando a Morte de Frente (Rocky Mountain, William Keighley, 1950)Último western de Flynn e uma grata surpresa, quando o assisti não esperava muita coisa desse faroeste e acabei me deparando com um exemplar excelente. Fotografia deslumbrante, trama fatalista, enquanto Flynn desponta mais másculo e melancólico do que nunca, anos-luz dos tempos saltitantes de Robin Hood sob a batuta parcial do mesmo diretor. Certamente um dos filmes que mais recomendaria para se conhecer o trabalho de Mr Flynn, além disso o desgraçado saiu com mais uma esposa debaixo do braço durante as filmagens.

9- A Glória de Amar (That Forsyte Woman, Compton Bennett, 1949)Quer ser respeitado como ator? Vai filmar com um cineasta inglês sobre um conto da Inglaterra vitoriana que tu vira Laurence Olivier! Ao menos era isso que se pensava e Mr Flynn também caiu nessa, não sem colher bons frutos, pois é passível de se dizer que o seu Forsyte é o trabalho mais desenvolvido de sua carreira, especialmente porque ele consegue deixar a sua irrestibilidade natural de lado e não só consegue se vender como aquele homem frio de negócios, como rouba o filme para si, enquanto Compton Bennett volta à sua obsessão com pianista-martirizada-por-homem-autoritário que tanto fez sua fama em O Sétimo Véu. Uma pena Flynn não ter sido bem aproveitado para além dos filmes de aventura.

10- Três Dias de Glória (Uncertain Glory, Raoul Walsh, 1944)Grande propaganda de guerra, mas ao contrário de muitos dos contemporâneos do estilo, este é efetivamente bom e consta um dos melhores papéis de Flynn, encarnanado um anti-herói pouco comum em sua carreira, um criminoso que finge ser um mártir de guerra e cujo desenvolvimento durante o filme é a dúvida entre ser um covarde vivo ou um herói morto. É exatamente por conta desse tipo de filme que Flynny deveria ser mais lembrado pelas parcerias com Walsh do que com o Curtiz.

11- Revolta (Edge of Darkness, Lewis Milestone, 1943)É um grande filme de modo geral, mesmo o cunho propagandista não interfere, Flynn está mais contido do que o usual, Ann Sheridan, Walter Huston e Ruth Gordon compensam cada segundo em cena, além da deslumbrante sequência inicial e o pouco comum ponto de vista da resistência norueguesa, mas talvez sua duração seja mais longa do que o necessário. Nunca cansaremos de ver nazistas no cinema, todos aqueles homens tão impetuosos e bem vestidos… Ninguém se vestia melhor do que os nazis, o figurino impecável é de morrer de inveja, a tal da superioridade ariana realmente era viável, mas só nas coleções outono/inverno.

12- Raízes do Céu (The Roots of Heaven, John Huston, 1958)E os três enfants terribles da Hollywood dos anos 30/40 se unem: Errol Flynn, Orson Welles e John Huston – agora não-tão-jovens, mas ainda terríveis. Some-se ainda mais um maluco, só que da literatura – Romain Gary – e a bagunça está formada em uma história de Gary preocupada com o abuso do homem sobre o animal (que o diga White Dog do Sam Fuller), preconizando um assunto que só viraria moda décadas mais tarde. O próprio Huston renegava este filme, mas putz, eu gosto dele, mesmo sendo uma bagunça, o filme possui uma força estranhamente peculiar, por isso ele está melhor colocado nesta listagem do que alguns outros, mesmo porque nenhum outro cineasta teve mais filmes falhos que são ao mesmo tempo obras-primas.
Não sei exatamente o que pensar quanto a sua natureza ideológica, baseado no livro de Gary – um defensor dos animais, mas adaptado por Huston – um caçador, não sei o que pensar da coisa toda, tanto vê-lo exclusivamente sob a óptica do idealismo ou sob a do cinismo me parece perspectivas não adequadas, talvez a intenção seja mesmo essa, algo como a versão “Rede de Intrigas do Greenpeace e PETA”, onde parte da galera tem preocupações sinceras, outra parte se preocupam por interesses próprios e a terceira parte está pouco se fodendo para qualquer coisa. Flynn mostra a sua faceta bêbada em tempo integral neste que foi um dos seus últimos filmes, pois morreria no ano seguinte, logo agora que finalmente estava sendo reconhecido como ator de verdade e não apenas um astro. As filmagens foram problemáticas do início ao fim, como era comum aos filmes de Huston, especialmente porque Darryl Zanuck ficou enchendo a paciência no set, pois não queria deixar a sua Juliette Greco solta nas savanas ao lado de Flynn e Huston, dois dos mais “perigosos” homens de que se tinha notícia.
A divertidíssima participação de Jude Law encarnando Flynn em O Aviador me remeteu imediatamante àquela historinha lendária (como todas as outras milhares de brigas que Flynny arrumou durante a vida – ninguém fez mais amigos através de socos do que ele) e ocorrida em meados dos anos 40 entre o duo Flynn-Huston. Segundo o narrado, a briga começa porque Flynn teria dito algo grosseiro sobre Havilland e Huston tomado as dores da ex-amante (não se fazem mais cavalheiros como antigamente!), daí eles foram para o jardim, lutaram boxe durante horas e ambos foram parar no hospital, Flynn com as costelas destruídas e Huston com o nariz quebrado.

*Da série: Este post foi programado, eu não estou aqui!

Film #5 in the Filmspotting World War II Marathon!

Screenplay By: Robert Rossen
Directed By: Lewis Milestone

I continue marching through the World War II Marathon, and A Walk In The Sun became to me like its subject matter, a slow, tedious march that was unbearable at times. A Walk In The Sun is so slow that time feels as if it is lurching by, one minute feels like ten, it’s that bad. It’s not the pacing alone, it is a combination of the pacing and the way in which the subject matter is tackled. I know that this is considered a strict adaptation from the source material, I haven’t read the novel so I am going on second hand, but the subject matter needs to be spiced up by the director to appeal in visual form.

Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do in A Walk In The Sun, talk. I’m not opposed to movies that are all talk, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset happen to be two of my favorite movies, but your characters need to grow and present different ideas as they talk. In A Walk In The Sun every idea has been presented by the fifteen minute mark. After that it’s repetition ad nauseum, there isn’t a single moment of revelation or single moment where I didn’t say to myself, “I just heard this, five minutes ago.” I understand the ideas that A Walk In The Sun wanted to express, but it wasn’t interesting to hear those ideas repeated over and over again.

Most of the blame falls on the writer, but just as much falls on the director, Lewis Milestone. It’s sad, but I almost dread All Quiet On The Western Front at this point. People have hyped it up to me, but I know it was directed by Milestone, and A Walk In The Sun is the third Milestone film I have seen, after The Purple Heart and Les Miserables, and they have all been sub-par efforts. In A Walk In The Sun Milestone has opportunities to change things up, to move his characters, to compel the audience and make me care about what is happening on screen. Instead he opts for a static camera, and the tiresome & never ending one shot/two shot technique. There are also moments when the screen is so dark that you can’t see a thing, maybe this was done on purpose, but it doesn’t add to the picture in any way.

The few action scenes in A Walk In The Sun are well done, but nothing special. They are interesting not because of any great quality, but because they break up the monotony of the picture for a few scant seconds. They don’t add to the story that much and the emotional impact that the final action sequence goes for is lost because I tuned out long before it gets to that point.

Hopefully things will pick up soon in the marathon, because after Lifeboat it has been one mediocre picture after another. I believe things will pick up, but A Walk In The Sun was not the movie to turn the marathon around. A Walk In The Sun isn’t bad, but it is thoroughly joyless, boring and fails to provoke thought or entertain in any way. Unless you are taking part in the marathon with me there’s no reason to subject yourself to A Walk In The Sun.

Rating:

**

Cheers,
Bill

Lataa Ohjelma (MP3)

KinoSilmässä palataan jälleen sotaelokuvien reipashenkiseen maailmaan kahden aikansa ja paikkansa mammuttiteoksen kanssa. Pasifismia julistetaan vuoden 1930 eeppisessä All Quiet On The Western Frontissa ja miehityksen aikaisia angsteja puretaan vuoden 1985 Neuvostoelokuvassa Idi I Smotri (Come and See).

Linkit:
All Quiet On The Western Front (Wikipedia)
All Quiet On The Western Front (IMDb)
All Quiet On The Western Front (Internet Archive)
Idi I Smotri (Wikipedia)
Idi I Smotri (IMDb)

Title: All Quiet on the Western Front
Year: 1930
Director: Lewis Milestone
Writers: Maxwell Anderson, George Abbott & Del Andrews, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque
Starring: Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres
Distinctions: Oscars for best picture and director; currently #211 on IMDb’s Top 250
Synopsis: a few years of WWI from the perspective of young German soldiers
How I saw it: on video (rented from Netflix), September 2008
Subjective Rating: 6/10
Objective Rating: 7/10 (points off for story, characters and acting)

I couldn’t watch it again because the acting is so bad, but the battle sequences are at least as good as any other serious war movie I’ve seen. And making it about Germans rather than Americans or British is kind of brilliant.

Con frase tomada de la entradilla de la novela en la que se inspira la película, se puede decir que ésta trata de la destrucción de una generación por la guerra. Pero mirando con algo más de amplitud cronológica, me parece que convendría hablar de la evidencia de la destrucción en Europa de algunos elementos humanos esenciales y la huella que esto dejó en la cultura occidental. Dentro de ella destacaría la conciencia que ésta adquiere de estar dañada en sus raíces: no cabe pensar otra cosa cuando se ha dado un fruto tan amargo como la Gran Guerra. Por eso se entiende que los historiadores, al hablar de las consecuencias de la prolongación de la guerra y de las intensidad con que se vivió, hablen de un cambio en las mentalidades.

Sin novedad en el frente habla del fracaso de nacionalismo como religión del Estado, del fracaso de cierta forma de entender la solidaridad nacional y el patriotismo, y de la muerte de un proyecto optimista que se suele identificar con el espíritu de progreso decimonónico, estrechamente vinculado al proyecto nacional. Sin novedad en el frente habla, en definitiva, de cómo todo el esfuerzo por construir un mundo más habitable dio lugar a todo lo contrario, a una realidad que destruía o vaciaba de sentido algunos elementos de la vida de los hombres sin los cuales la vida no merecería ese nombre.

Pablo Pérez López, Una generación destruida por la guerra: Sin novedad en el frente, p. 65.

DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, First PRESIDENT Of The Academy Awards, Presents!!!

No Celebrities, No U.S. MONARCHY, HOLLYWOOD STARS, Movie Icons ONLY!!

With His REX INGRAM CENTER, For The Promotion and Diffusion Of The AMERICAN SILENT MOVIES, Fred Vidal, PhD Celebrates Today The 1929 OSCARS, Academy Awards Of The Future, Because Of The Past, Waiting For the 2009 and 2010 Awards With CREATIVITY!

www.youtube.com/rexingramcenter

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929.  Two hundred and fifty people attended the black-tie banquet in the Blossom Room of The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, On Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, CALIFORNIA.

Let’s Come back To The Origins!! The NEW FASHION, It’s THE 20’s!

CLARA BOW Message To HOLLYWOOD: Ready, Steady, Go!! My UNIFORM Is My WARDROBE!!

In 2010, Let’s Ask For A WEB Celebration Of The CEREMONY With a 1920’s WARDROBE For The Street Life!!

1929-2009: Academy Awards, BACK TO THE FUTURE? Fred Vidal Diffuses The FIRST Oscar Winners List! As A SOURCE LIFE!!

Explanation: People are Too Often in an Artificial World. Confusion between Hollywood and The Film Industry must be studied and appreciated as a Risk of dilusional behavior. The MOVIE INDUSTRY Is Another Industry that Still works Well and Must Continue To Work well by Keeping The REALITY ON THE GROUND.

The Oscars: It’s just a Selection of the Best Works of The Year. No Dream or Legend Live On Your TV Screen. It’s not Technical, It’s Cultural but Not a Film, Not a Show: A CEREMONY, word well-known For Emotions but First For ORGANIZATION. So, Let’s Appreciate, Before Tonight, THE LIST of The Definitive FIRST WINNERS. After that, This List Is Longer, and This Year is Another Line!

From 1929 (year with the reputation of the American Economy Crisis) to 2009 (year that begins slowly for the Economy but surely for our INDUSTRY), and The New Design BOOM: It’s THE 1920’s, Believe It!!

BEST FILM:

 Two Best Picture Awards:

Best Picture, Production – Wings, directed by William A. Wellman, starring Clara Bow, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Richard Arlen, Jobvna Ralston, El Brendel, Richard Tucker, and Gary Cooper.

Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Picture – Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, directed by German expatriate F.W. Murnau, starring George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston and Bodil Rosing.

BEST ACTOR

Swiss-born Emil Jannings  for two films: The Way of All Flesh (1927) and  The Last Command (1928).

BEST ACTRESS

Janet Gaynor for 3 Films : Seventh Heaven and Sunrise (1927), 1928’s Street Angel (1928).

BEST DIRECTOR, COMEDY PICTURE

Lewis Milestone, Two Arabian Nights (1927)

BEST DIRECTOR, DRAMATIC PICTURE

Frank Borzage, Seventh Heaven

CLARA BOW: Fred VIDAL Choice To INSPIRE The 2010's!!! "1930: American screen star Clara Bow (1905 - 1965), popularly known as the 'It' girl plays Norma Martin in Paramount's comedy romance 'Her Wedding Night', directed by Frank Tuttle. (Photo by Eugene Robert Richee)".

BEST WRITING, ORIGINAL STORY

Ben Hecht, Underworld (1927)

BEST WRITING, ADAPTATION

Benjamin Glazer, Seventh Heaven (1927)

BEST WRITING, TITLE WRITING

Joseph Farnham, George Marion, Jr.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, Sunrise

BEST ART DIRECTION

William Cameron Menzies, The Dove (1927) and Tempest (1928)

BEST EFFECTS, ENGINEERING EFFECTS

Roy Pomeroy, Wings

HONORARY AWARD

Charlie Chaplin for The Circus (1928) , for “versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing”.

Warner Brothers  for the production of The Jazz Singer in 1927, first film to use synchronized sound in a feature film.

WINGS: Clara BOW Universal Breakthrough, First OSCAR FOR A FILM!

ON TWITTER, It Was Said, Before 9AM The Day Of The OSCARS:

Fred Vidal: So Enjoy ABC Tonight, We Schedule DEF Tomorrow 4 A LIVE EVENT Next Year On ABC Too: More OSCARS, Less STRESS, THE CRISIS BEHIND! 4 minutes ago from web

FOLLOW THE TREND, BE TWITTER, READ FRED and be happy!!
http://twitter.com/fredvidal

All Quiet on the Western Front (dir. Lewis Milestone, USA, 1930) impressed me.  The structure of films from this time can be really stop-and-go, especially a literary adaptation, which can get bogged down in getting out the expressive scenes and lines from the novel but not quite sure how to put it all together in a cinematic fashion.  All Quiet… rarely got stuck in these predictable ruts.

The honesty and grim seriousness of the film was set up by an open and unified camera and editing style.  The camera tracks effectively through interior and exterior spaces, sewing the marching troops into an overall compositional texture.  The editing was not over-emphatic, but instead let the emotions of the soldiers turn from heart-wrenching to pathetic and back again, unconstrained by cookie-cutter editing.

The scenes are sometimes very tableaux-like and literary, but the battle scenes explode this, dissolving the specific characters into a huge cinematic dance of death, with hyperreal tracking shots of French soldiers being mowed down with a machine gun (that is positioned behind the camera, making our vision both a source and destination of violence) that are sickening in its machine-like smoothness.

The use of sound was very interesting; rarely did the film use non-diegetic music – I think only at the beginning and the end, thus leaving a broad empty expanse in the middle to be filled with the gun shots and explosions of trench warfare – a cohesive sound design that is hauntingly effective.

It is always nice to see great composition in a full aspect ratio, as i feel widescreen can diminish composition because of the fact that it is widescreen and somehow should and can take care of itself as an interesting visual.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise)

Audiences rarely see American films about the German perspective of World War II and Nazism. There is Lewis Milestone’s 1930 antiwar classic All Quiet on the Western Front but it is set during World War I. Sam Peckinpah’s brutal Cross of Iron (1977) shovels scorn upon the treatment of German soldiers by their careerist seniors and psychotic Nazi commanders, but it is a criminally underappreciated film that few people have seen. Valkyrie is hence an intriguing film for Hollywood to make because it is told from a German perspective and, like Cross of Iron, it sharply distinguishes the differences between members of the Nazi regime and the regular German army.

Valkyrie is based on the assassination attempt that was made on Adolf Hitler’s life in 1944. The plot to kill Hitler was highly organised and involved prominent German military officers and politicians. Claus von Stauffenberg, a severally wounded Colonel, who in Valkyrie is portrayed as being completely opposed to Hitler on both nationalistic and moral grounds, led the operation. He realises that in order to become a true German patriot, he must become a traitor. In a possible dig at the recent Iraq War, Strauffenberg is depicted as being wise enough to realise that it is not enough to remove the man at the top of the chain of command, there must be a plan for what happens next. Hence the collaborators create an ingenious plan to turn the German reserve army and SS against each other, using emergency powers labelled Operation Valkyrie.

Valkyrie is a slow burning thriller with an emphasis on the plotting and planning rather than action. Even though we know that the plot did not succeed, Valkyrie does give us a tantalising feeling that Stauffenberg just might succeed in saving Europe from Hitler. The build up of tension on 20 June 1944, the day the assassination attempt takes place, is almost unbearable. Director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) gives Valkyrie the same cool, crisp and almost washed out look that he used in the X-Men films and Superman Returns, heightening the constant threat of exposure.

Claus and Nina von Stauffenberg (Carice van Houten)

Tom Cruise plays Strauffenberg with the type of determined conviction that you could imagine that such a man would have had. The biggest flaw in Valkyrie however is the depiction of Strauffenberg as a man who is far too perfect. By portraying Strauffenberg as so incredibly clean cut in his devotion to his family, his love for his country and his hatred of Nazism, he becomes a two dimensional character that is difficult to believe. What motivated the actual Strauffenberg is far more complex than clear-cut moral convictions and Valkyrie does suffer for excluding the more complicated details about him.

There are other minor issues about Valkyrie that may frustrate. It assumes knowledge of the Holocaust, barely mentioning the Nazi atrocities let alone depicting them. Unlike the upcoming film The Reader (Stephen Daldry), which does not make any fuss over the fact that the actors play Germans but speak in English, Valkyrie draws too much attention to it. Accents are mixed and the film begins with the rather contrived technique of having Cruise narrate in subtitled German, which then fades into English. Nevertheless, Valkyrie is a decent historical thriller, which remains reasonably respectful to its source material.

© Thomas Caldwell, 2009

Lt. Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) has been given the order: take Pork Chop Hill. If it’s taken by the Chinese, US negotiators at the Panmunjom peace conference would lose face with their communist adversariesan unthinkable outcome. And so, Clemons leads his troops into combat, to fight for an objective that they know to be strategically pointless. But they also know that an order is an order and they must take Pork Chop Hillor die tryingso that millions can live in freedom tomorrow for what Clemons and his men will sacrifice today. Based on a true story and featuring an all-star supporting cast, Pork Chop Hill is an exceptional film”grim, rugged, awesome and lastingly impressive” (The New York Times).

This gritty, grim Korean war drama presents the grueling ordeal of a platoon charged with taking a hill of no military value during the final days of the war. While diplomats and generals argue over peace negotiations (in an appropriately wordless montage under the opening credits), tough but compassionate Lt. Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) leads a unit of 135 men up a well-guarded hill while miscommunication–and at times no communication–cuts them off from reinforcements and regimental command. Shot against a bleak, battle-scarred mountain of white dust honeycombed with black trenches, director Lewis Milestone presents the devastating battle as a meaningless sacrifice of hundreds of lives spent in a political game of chicken. Peck leads a terrific cast of young talents and character actors, many of them just starting their respective careers: Rip Torn, Harry Guardino, Martin Landau, Norman Fell, George Peppard, Gavin MacLeod, Bert Remsen, Harry Dean Stanton, plus veteran stalwarts Woody Strode, James Edwards, Robert Blake, and Bob Steele. Milestone had previously directed the pacifist WWI classic All Quiet on the Western Front and the compassionate WWII platoon drama A Walk in the Sun. Pork Chop Hill adds one more antiwar classic to his r�sum�, the angry power of his drama overcoming the hollow patriotic voice-over (reportedly added by Peck) that concludes the drama. –Sean Axmaker

Pork Chop Hill is available at Amazon for $13.49. To Order click here
Amazon Product Pages contain a lot of other details on this product as Customer Reviews, Sales Ranking, Special Offers, Alternate products that customers are going for and much more.Want to read these details? click here

Want to get some other Format / Binding / Version? You can search for them from here

Other Products of Interest

• Twelve O’Clock High (Special Edition)
• Hell Is For Heroes
• The Bridges at Toko-Ri
• Fixed Bayonets
• The Bridge at Remagen

Another take on the Victor Hugo classic!

Written By: Richard Murphy
Directed By: Lewis Milestone

Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is indeed a classic, and it has been adapted to the big screen many times. This version is by Lewis Milestone and it came on the heels of an Italian version in the same year and the excellent 1935 version, Les Misérables. Coming after such a lively and heartfelt version of the story made it hard for Milestone’s Les Miserables to ever gain ground with me. All the trappings are there, the corrupt law, man’s struggle to better himself and to overcome his evil nature. The weird bond between pseudo father and daughter. All of the underpinnings of the story are present, but they are executed without heart and without care.

Les Miserables is almost a shot for shot remake of the 1935 version, but simply copying something shot for shot isn’t enough. Somewhere in the transfer of shots they lost the little things that made the 1935 version so great. You don’t feel for Jean Valjean nor is Javert as dastardly and without recompense in Milestone’s Les Miserables. A by the numbers movie may look good execution wise, but if it doesn’t have the heart or ability to make you care then it is simply an execution in technique.

If you want to see Les Miserables, then watch the truly classic 1935 version and steer clear of Milestone’s 1952 Les Miserables. You will have a much better experience with the 1935 version, but if you are like me and curiosity gets the better of you then watch this, as well as the other versions, and compare them to see how they match up with each other. But, outside of comparisons sake leave this version of Les Miserables alone.

Rating:

**

Cheers,
Bill

Segundo o American Film Institute, os dez melhores são estes:

1. “Lawrence da Arábia” (1962), de David Lean
2. “Ben-Hur” (1959), de William Wyler
3. “A Lista de Schindler” (1993), de Steven Spielberg
4. “…E o Vento Levou” (1939), de Victor Fleming
5. “Spartacus” (1960), de Stanley Kubrick
6. “Titanic” (1997), de James Cameron
7. “Nada de Novo no Front” (1930), de Lewis Milestone
8. “O Resgate do Soldado Ryan” (1998), de Steven Spielberg
9. “Reds” (1981), de Warren Beatty
10. “Os Dez Mandamentos” (1956), de Cecil B. DeMille

USA 131m, sound (B&W)
Director: Lewis Milestone; Cast: Louis Wolheim, Lewis Ayres, John Wray, Arnold Lucy, and Ben Alexander

All Quiet on the Western Front is arguably the most realistic war film ever produced. There are few heroic tales or brave deeds portrayed in Lewis Milestone’s faithful adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic WWI anti-war novel about a lost generation of young men. The brutality and realism of the battle sequences are played out in an ugly destroyed landscape strewn with craters, mud, rats and bodies. The visual effects are are well-matched by a never-ending barrage of explosions, machine gun fire and the scream of shellfire amongst the shouts and cries of the soldiers. The most poignant and perhaps controversial line comes from Paul, who states “It’s dirty and painful to die for your country” (Klaus Ming November 2008).

Lt. Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) has been given the order: take Pork Chop Hill. If it’s taken by the Chinese, US negotiators at the Panmunjom peace conference would lose face with their communist adversariesan unthinkable outcome. And so, Clemons leads his troops into combat, to fight for an objective that they know to be strategically pointless. But they also know that an order is an order and they must take Pork Chop Hillor die tryingso that millions can live in freedom tomorrow for what Clemons and his men will sacrifice today. Based on a true story and featuring an all-star supporting cast, Pork Chop Hill is an exceptional film”grim, rugged, awesome and lastingly impressive” (The New York Times).

This gritty, grim Korean war drama presents the grueling ordeal of a platoon charged with taking a hill of no military value during the final days of the war. While diplomats and generals argue over peace negotiations (in an appropriately wordless montage under the opening credits), tough but compassionate Lt. Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) leads a unit of 135 men up a well-guarded hill while miscommunication–and at times no communication–cuts them off from reinforcements and regimental command. Shot against a bleak, battle-scarred mountain of white dust honeycombed with black trenches, director Lewis Milestone presents the devastating battle as a meaningless sacrifice of hundreds of lives spent in a political game of chicken. Peck leads a terrific cast of young talents and character actors, many of them just starting their respective careers: Rip Torn, Harry Guardino, Martin Landau, Norman Fell, George Peppard, Gavin MacLeod, Bert Remsen, Harry Dean Stanton, plus veteran stalwarts Woody Strode, James Edwards, Robert Blake, and Bob Steele. Milestone had previously directed the pacifist WWI classic All Quiet on the Western Front and the compassionate WWII platoon drama A Walk in the Sun. Pork Chop Hill adds one more antiwar classic to his r�sum�, the angry power of his drama overcoming the hollow patriotic voice-over (reportedly added by Peck) that concludes the drama. –Sean Axmaker

Pork Chop Hill is available at Amazon for $13.49. To Order click here
Amazon Product Pages contain a lot of other details on this product as Customer Reviews, Sales Ranking, Special Offers, Alternate products that customers are going for and much more.Want to read these details? click here

Want to get some other Format / Binding / Version? You can search for them from here

Other Products of Interest

• Twelve O’Clock High (Special Edition)
• The Bridges at Toko-Ri
• Hell Is For Heroes
• Fixed Bayonets
• The Bridge at Remagen

Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. (Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden)

Preliminary Notes:

Taking to heart the French statesman George Clemenceau’s – whose terms to Germany after World War I was a contributing factor to the advent of the second – famous line that “war is a much too serious matter to be entrusted to the military”, I thought a rundown of how war has been presented on film could fit the bill. I will focus on films made after the silent era and mostly western films. For this first part of the article, I’ll concentrate on films made before 1980, as more recent films are generally better known, and as I opine, perhaps hazardly, that the modern War Film starts with Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One from 1980. Even though war is eternal, I’ll not discuss conflicts prior to the American civil war. Naturally, I will dedicate more lines to some films than others. I’ll try to only include more or less worthwhile films, so there will be no further mention of, say, A Farewell to Arms in any of its movie incarnations (read the book instead!). I’ll deal with them as they pop up in my mind, so don’t expect a strictly linear account!

What is a war film? I think the genre can be divided into at least 5 sub-genres:
1-The Soldier’s War (These films should feature battles or at least mostly stay with the soldiers on and off the battle field.)
2-The /Leaders’/Generals’ war (These also normally include battles, but are more concerned with the machinations and tactics and are often indicative of History’s hindsight and received wisdom concerning the outcome).
3-The POW-film ( Prisoners of war).
4-The Home Front-film (Films relating the situation and state of morale away from the intense battles. These films can deal with the local resistance, with war-profiteering, with acts of collusion, etc. Often they are about everyday-people and how they “do their part”)
5-The Agent/Spy-film (This can at times overlap with all of the above, especially number 4).

All of these subgenres can have subgenres of their own: The Soldier’s War can be a submarine-film, for example, with all that entails of regular features such as the beeping radar and having to dive deeper than the hull can theoretically stand, claustrophobia, etc. It can also be a boot camp film, but most of these see action in the second half (Full Metal Jacket,1987, being an obvious modern example). I think that for most, the term War Film denotes soldiers fighting enemy soldiers in some way or another. Thus, I consider the first two subgenres I mentioned the only kind of “pure” war films. I’ll try to focus on these, but will mention other types as well.

Usually war films can also be separated by difference of intent; what is the purpose of the film? I think it is possible to separate between the Serious War Film and War As Entertainment. Of course, most films have a bit of both, but the weight tends to fall solidly down on one of the sides. In the latter case, war is often tangential, an excuse for blowing up things and tell an exciting story; almost what Hitchcock referred to as a MacGuffin; Kelly’s Heroes is an example, maybe also Casablanca. This doesn’t make them less worthy as films; it is not unusual for films like this to be better than the often propagandistic and preaching serious film. A rule of thumb is that the closer in time the film is to the conflict it portrays, the more likely is an overt element of propaganda. Then also, one has films that take place in a war situation – particularly films that were made during the war – but has little interest in the war itself except as a setting and a time for the story; Preston Sturges’ comedies Hail the Conquering Hero and Miracle at Morgan’s Creek (both 1944) are examples. They both feature soldiers aplenty and talk about the protagonists’ wishes to enlist, but neither film could care less about the war.

1-Lewis Milestone

One can’t well escape the name Lewis Milestone while talking of war films. He made All Quiet on the Western Front as early as in 1930. William Wellman had made Wings in 1927, also dealing with world war I, but Milestone’s classic was not only the first sound film on the subject, but one of the best ever. It holds up surprisingly well today, with the action scenes having a much more authentic feel to them than anything cooked up well into the 1990s. It is definitely on my top ten list of the best war films ever made.

Milestone went on to make some more near-classics in the genre. I really like Pork Chop Hill (1959), about a true incident toward the end of the Korean war, with Gregory Peck as the stolid squad leader. It tackles the absurdness of having to defend a hill that has little – if any – strategic value. The soldiers are put in the war zone merely for reasons of allowing the time for political back room manoeuvres. Interspersed with the intense fighting, we catch glimpses of this other kind of war, where the participants risk nothing but lack of prestige. After having ploughed through at least a hundred war films, I’ve come to realize that most good films of this type are in fact anti-war films, and many pointing out the surreal aspect of war’s existence, which is hardly that difficult to do (see, or rather, don’t, Catch 22 or especially Mash – one of my least favourite films! – for the laughably evident and clichéd take on this subject). Pork Chop Hill is in the tradition of the antiwar-film, but as with his 1930 masterwork, Milestone manages to imbue the battle scenes with a sense of reality uncommon for the time the film was made, and the dilemmas and situations seem real to a degree that puts most Hollywood films to shame.

In between his films of the First World War and the Korean war, Milestone also made a film about the battles of the pacific, Halls of Montezuma (1951), with the ever dependable Richard Widmark, and one about the 1943 invasion of Italy: A Walk in the Sun. This is considered to be maybe the first film that captured the experience and everyday worries of the soldiers in a realistic way. I have not seen the latter due to it being impossible to find in a satisfying DVD release, but Halls…, while solid and containing some classic scenes and dilemmas, is not quite up to the level of these other films. Milestone made a bunch of other war films (I have a bit of faith in The Purple Heart, which I will see soon), but while most of these receive passable reviews, I have not yet seen them and can’t comment on their respective qualities.

Other good early war films include Jean Renoir’s WWI POW-drama La Grande Illusion (1937) and Michael Curtiz’ Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), one of the few films about the Crimean War, though not all that historically trustworthy. I’d like to see Howard Hawks’ The Road to Glory (1936) about WWI trench warfare and with a script by William Faulkner, but haven’t yet had the opportunity.

2-John Huston and Documentaries

During World War II, many of Hollywood’s directors were made officers and sent out to shoot real documentary footage of the war. John Ford (Who made the Oscar winning documentary The Battle of Midway, not to be confused with the later motion picture of the same name), Frank Capra, George Stevens and William Wyler all made excellent reportage-films that mostly managed to elevate themselves from base propaganda. John Huston made some films in this way that today are considered classics, independently of which context they were made in (Battle of San Pietro, Let There Be Light). Most of the films he shot had to go through the military for approval, and as a consequence were heavily edited, or classified and only recently being shown to the general public. The men in power felt that Huston showed a side of the war the public were better off not knowing about. This included attempts to humanize the enemy, show less than wholesome examples of American soldiers and their behaviour in the war and examine the psychical scars of the soldiers.

Of course, Huston later went on to make some of the best films of the 20th. century – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, Key Largo, The Man Who Would be King. He had early on tried his hand at handling the war in a less serious way in Across the Pacific (1942), which was fatally cut without his presence, as he was on a boat on the way to the real war. Then he had more luck with the wonderful war drama Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. This could almost have been a play between the two persons, as they are alone on the screen for 90% of the film. However, when the Japanese land on the island that our protagonists find themselves marooned on, the film becomes genuinely exciting and it avoids falling into the usual traps of cliché and contrivance. I like it a lot!

Huston made a final attempt to handle the war theme in the ludicrous Escape to Victory when he was well past his powers as a filmmaker. While this film didn’t pave his way into Director’s Heaven, the road was already neatly laid, as he made The Red Badge of Courage (1951). It is about the American Civil War, and is among the all time greats of war films. Huston’s original cut was probably about 30 minutes longer than the 69 minutes of the theatrical release. The studio made the cuts while Huston was in Africa to shoot The African Queen (which I could have included here, since it’s set in WWI, but I feel it is more of a romance than a war film. It is, though, very good!). They based their vandalism on preview screenings in which scenes of cowardice had angered the test audience. Maybe the Generals had been right in censoring Huston’s earlier war documentaries, as the audience evidently preferred the sanitized version? It says something about Huston’s understanding of war that the film is so good still in its butchered version. (Mind, The Red Badge of Courage is probably not for everyone. Huston uses on purpose an archaic way of storytelling, and this might in effect be estranging for some). It is one of my film historical dreams that the lost material will one day resurface, but I think the chances are slim.

3-The Europeans during the War

The British were perhaps more accommodating to letting reality creep into their fictions. David Lean’s In Which We Serve, a study about the personnel of a navy ship told in flashbacks as the survivors of a German attack clings to a raft, is notable for drawing a rounded picture of the men and their backgrounds, and as such bringing questions of class and position in society into the mix. It is at times sentimental, but it is more often true. Carol Reed’s The Way Ahead (1944) begins as a typical propaganda film about the importance of “doing one’s part”, but the film seems to grow and, because of the talent at hand, go beyond what one should expect from a film of this genre. It is one of the best “training” films I have seen, adding a pathos and realism to the boot camp-scenes that impressed me.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp is something as seldom as a genuinely intelligent and reflective film about the concept of war – and the men who make war – made during the war (It was released in the UK in 1943, but not until May 1945 did it premiere in USA). They also made the solid One of our Aircraft is Missing (1942), about a real case involving the Dutch resistance, and 49th Parallel (1941), which I haven’t seen yet, so I can’t comment upon its merits. I will say, though, that I have not yet seen a bad film from Powell and Pressburger, and at least five of their films are in my top 200 list (Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, which is also a war film of sorts and quite wonderful, I Know Where I’m Going, A Canterbury Tale, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes are all genuine classics).

Alfred Hitchcock made Saboteur (1942) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), both of these are about spies/foreign agents and both well inside the War as Entertainment – and propaganda – category. – And entertaining they are! They are technically American films, and Foreign Correspondent ends with a passionate plea to the Americans to enter the war. He made a more “serious entertainment” in 1944, taking on John Steinbeck’s propagandist script about a group of survivors in the eponymous Lifeboat. It’s wonderful to see how the master manages to keep the camerashots of the film interesting and maintain a constant tension in such a limited set as a lifeboat.

One of the biggest film successes coming out of the war was William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver, about an upper middle class family and their tribulations during the blitz in England. It won lots of Oscars and even spurred a sequel, The Miniver Story, which is not particularly worthwhile. The original has been a bit of a pet peeve among modern critics, thinking it dated and anachronistic in its portrayal of the class system (rich people are really kind if you just talk nicely to them!). I think it holds up well, even though the first scene, where Mrs. Miniver just HAS to buy a birdlike hat, is a bit beyond the pale. Wyler’s direction is so good that the possible unfortunate political ramifications take a back seat to the “common spirit of the English” and some wonderful scenes of the family finding strength in each other, even winning over to their side a goddamn sentimental commie like myself. And Teresa Wright has never done a bad film as far as I’m concerned.

In Italy, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City kick started the Italian Neo-Realism. It was made while Rome was in ruins and the war almost not ended yet, and – as the movement’s name indicates – is indeed more realistic than its Hollywood counterpart in dealing with the people that fight a war, even though they fight invisibly and die unknown. Better than most films, it shows that you’ll find allies as well as enemies in unlikely places. Many of the featured “actors” had been in the resistance until days before shooting. There are scenes in this film that stay in your memory.

I’ll take the opportunity, while writing about Europe and the Resistance, to mention one of my all time favourites of the “resistance-genre”, even though it’s made much later (1969): Army in the Shadows (L’Armée des Ombres). This is a must-see for anyone interested in the subject. The director, Jean Pierre Melville, is definitely among my three favourite Frog-helmers. While I enjoy immensely Le Samourai (1967) with Alain Delon, I think this is his best film. (Mind, I’ve not seen Le Doulos yet…). As I have just seen La Silence de la Mer, made by people fighting for the resistance (Melville was a French jew) and based on an important novel of war time France, I simply must mention here how much I liked it. It is by no means an action approach to resistance work, rather dealing with ideas of nationality and personality; what does an occupation force want, and how can one repel it? It talks of the history of one country in consequence wanting to erase the history of another. It is a film that manages to be very literary (with voice-overs and long one-way dialogues that must not be mistaken for monologues, as that would go contrary to the film’s meaning) and very filmatic at the same time. It is enough to see how the dialogue is finally executed, the promise of a reply finally fulfilled, by the leaving open of a book by Anatole France. The following reaction shot zooms in on the messenger with a force that left me shaken and stirred, and is an example of the power of film, of moving images. The film is shot in a way to make it look older than it is, thereby accentuating the historic (history of cultures) and eternal aspect of the story’s ideas.

Honourable mention, while discussing resistance films, must also go to Paul Verhoeven’s rascally 2006-film Black Book (Zwartboek) as well as the same director’s Soldaat van Oranje (1977). I did not think so highly of Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray (2001), which was more of a pure entertainment and not more than passable at that. And finally, let me not forget to mention the Norwegian classic Ni Liv (Nine Lives) by Arne Skouen. It was well deservedly nominated for an Oscar in 1958 and, while maybe a bit dated, is of a higher class both in terms of realism and art than most other Scandinavian films of that or any time.

Let me finally add here that I know there are many Eastern European, in particular Russian, films from the 50s and 60s that would warrant an inclusion here, but as I’m not yet familiar with these, I’ll leave them for another occasion or a future post. I’ve read good things about the Rumanian film Mihai Viteazul (Last Crusade) (1970), which is about a war before the timeframe I’ve chosen for this article, and Roman Polanski’s old mentor Andrzej Wajda made a famous trilogy that I’ve not yet seen, with films like Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds, about the Polish war experience. As for Asian films, I’ll try to include them in a separate post, as this article seems to be long enough as it is…

4- Hollywood During the War

Not all film-makers were documentarists during the war. Hollywood also made more traditional war films. The best of the more or less realistic Hollywood films was probably The Story of G.I. Joe by William Wellman. However, Hollywood’s role was foremost to do what it does best: make entertainments. I have mentioned Casablanca (1942), which everyone knows. Michael Curtiz’ unexpected hit spurred a number of copies, one time even with the same director, most of the actors and a similar story; Passage to Marseille (Michael Curtiz, 1944). Bogart also played in Zoltan Korda’s Sahara, about some Americans and British troops that must join forces to stave off the thirsty German battalion that wants their water supply. Sahara is solid entertainment but not great. Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944), again with Bogart, is in the same vein as Casablanca. It is very entertaining, with a script so full of one-liners it could put modern Hollywood to painful shame, and a fantastic film, but I feel it is stretching it a bit to call it a war film.

Some films chose a middle ground by portraying the war in a pseudo-documentary fashion and adding contrived traditional plots: Guadalcanal Diary (1943) about battles of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific and Wake Island (1942) (also about the Pacific) both starr William Bendix. The latter film is directed by John Farrow, who has made some wonderful Film Noirs. I have only seen excerpts of these films, but a general impression is that the scripts seem weak but the fighting real. This can partly be explained by the use of stock footage, but also by the participation – quite literally – of the US-army (and especially the US Marine).

Then there was John Wayne, who didn’t volunteer for service, partly because he wanted to capitalize on his new found fame in John Ford’s Stagecoach. While he didn’t really make any noteworthy films during the war years, when John Ford came back from the war, they made They Were Expendable together in 1945, about a group of Patrol Torpedo boaters in the Philippines, and that is a bit of all right. There are some impressive battle scenes (between boats and planes, between land based batteries and the boats) and a strangely “un-Hollywoodish” air over the plot: The hero doesn’t get the girl, the film ends in seemingly defeat, with the last caption saying “We’ll be back!” This feels a bit odd, considering it’s about events in 1942-43 and the film is from 1945. The defeat at the end of the film is also the subject of Tay Garnett’s Bataan (1943), with Robert Taylor as the tough sergeant famously yelling “come and get it suckers!” to the Japanese attackers. Bataan was evidently MGM’s answer to Paramount’s Wake Island, by the way. This film also ends with a declaration intended to give hope: “Their spirit will lead us back to Bataan.” It’s a bit ironic that the film could almost be a remake of John Ford’s 1934 film The Lost Patrol, about a group of WWI soldiers fighting off Arabs. Ford’s film was again a remake of a 1929-version of the film, and the already mentioned Sahara is a remake of sorts of both of them.

Sam Wood’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – about the Spanish civil war – is marred by the director’s/studio’s insistence on not calling the rightwing Francoists “fascist” and Gary Cooper’s guerrillas “communist”. Sam Wood was, by the way, a staunch supporter for McCarthy and his Hollywood witch hunts (The Commie Scare), so I don’t think he was quite the right man for the task. As John Huston writes in his autobiography, An Open Book, Sam Wood was a rabid anti-communist and made a will on his death bed where he stated that his daughter would inherit everything, providing she didn’t prove to be a communist. Lewis Milestone, incidentally, conveyed to Huston that he was somewhat distressed that Wood had threatened to expose him as a commie. Apart from the film being less than what it could have been, it is still a grand entertainment and Ingrid Bergman is as always lovely.

Neither must one forget Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941), which – although concerning WWI – was promoting general US patriotism and made the country ready for another war, so to say. And, talking about propaganda, who can forget Michael Curtiz’ splendid, though enormously jingoistic, semi-musical, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), with James Cagney in an eye opening and brilliant performance? Man, that man can dance! Let me at last give a shout out for veteran director Raul Walsh’s Objective Burma! (1945), which has an entertaining story and impressive fight scenes, good enough to outdo most films made 20 or 30 years later.

5-Hollywood After the War

After World War II ended, there came a batch of films trying to show the people back home how the war had been for the soldiers fighting it. The best film dealing with the homecoming experience itself must be William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which is one of my favourite films, period. It has all the elements that The Studio System at its best and most adventurous could deliver; an ensemble cast of great, great actors and actresses, a story that seems not only important but right to tell, feeling much more real than Hollywood’s recent batch of issue-films. Crash (2004), for example, looks inane in its political correctness in comparison. And I don’t think Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) holds a candle to the experience of a soldier’s return in Wyler’s masterwork. The closest in quality I have seen of dealing with the immediate post war experience is a quite different sort of film, focusing on the rebuilding of Berlin and the consequences of the American presence there: Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948). It is at times a comedy, but the comedy is dark and mostly it is a very impressive contemporary take on the German’s situation. (For a pure comedic version, one can see Wilder’s later One, Two, Three (1961), which deals with the cold war and the divided Germany, and manages to be a savage criticism about both Capitalism and Communism while still being very funny. It’s hardly a war film, though!).

I also think that without Fred Zinneman’s The Men (1950), Oliver Stone would have a few war films less on his resumé. – And, speaking of Zinneman, let’s not forget his classic army base film, From Here to Eternity, based on James Jones’ brilliant first novel about military life and death – and some reflections about the injustices of the military as an institution – just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Many think of the film as a kind of romantic drama, a notion probably aided by the famous beach scene with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, which is one of the enduring images of the 20th century. Make no mistake about it, though, this film portrays a man’s world, which makes both the men’s and women’s lot in the film far removed from any chances of lasting happiness outside the rush of war. For a continuation of the action started in this film, see for example Otto Preminger’s In Harm’s Way, that I’ve written about in an earlier post, or Richard Fleischer/Kinji Fukasaku’s Tora! Tora! Tora! (Fukasaku took over the Japanese sections of the film after Akira Kurosawa got disillusioned about the production. Fukasaku’s last film was, by the way, the youth/media war satire Battle Royale).

Battleground (1949) is considered to be one of the best early post war films dealing with the European Theatre, as they call it. It’s about the battle of the Bulge and is directed by William Welman, a man who can do little wrong, so I have every intention of seeing it soon. It is also hard to evade Twelve O’Clock High (1949), which was a very popular film of its time. It holds up well, even though it’s clear that the battle scenes are stock footage. The drama of the squadron and the narrative arches of the characters are so satisfyingly built, that I think it is near timeless. After the audience had grown tired of the war and had begun preferring films about soldiers returning instead, this film renewed an interest in the war film for a while.

I just rewatched Robert Aldrich’s Attack (1956) and was even more impressed by it than the first time. While it is at times evident it is based on a play, Jack Palance and Lee Marvin are two of the toughest actors ever and can make pretty much anything seem realistic. It is about a cowardly officer (who reminded me a lot of George W. Bush and how his army stint would probably have worked out had he not been able to evade military service) and the honest soldier who wants to kill him for leaving his men to die. (The coward, played by Eddie Albert, comes from a rich dynastic family with political pull). Attack! also has battle scenes that remind me a lot of the Medal of Honor-game, and that is never a bad thing!

1957 was quite the year for war films, as the observant reader will see. The classic sub film The Enemy Below, with Curt Jurgens and Robert Mitchum as German sub-captain and captain of an American Destroyer respectively, was a big hit of its day and widely referenced in the later Tarantino-scripted parts of Crimson Tide (1995). The Enemy Below is impressive in its sympathetic portrayal of the honourable German captain. I like how the film posits the viewer in Mitchum’s place to such an extent that when Mitchum finally salutes him, it’s like the viewer of the film takes part in the recognition. The year after brought us Robert Wise’s Run Silent, Run Deep, with an elderly Clark Gable and an always vital Burt Lancaster.

I must not forget two of the most famous war films in this section: Stanley Kubrick’s excellent black and white film Paths of Glory (1957), which sums up so much of the human injustice of war, and World War I in particular, and David Lean’s epic masterpiece The Bridge on the River Kwai (also 1957). These films are so well known, that I won’t be saying a whole lot about them, except that if one for some strange reason has not seen them, do it, and do it now!

But USA must always be in one war or another (as Plato said: Only the dead have seen the end of the war), so when the Chinese decided to back communist forces in Korea, the American war machine started huffing and puffing again. At least it gave the WW2 veteran and maverick director Samuel Fuller a chance to make a couple of break through films: Fixed Bayonets! and The Steel Helmet (both 1951; notice the opening shot of that steel helmet, seemingly a piece of debris on the ground with a bullet hole in it, and then, after the credits, it begins to move and rise and we see the grizzled face of the excellent Gene Evans!). I can only say that everyone should see these! Fuller has a style and approach to psychological realism that is almost unheard of – at least in the Hollywood of the fifties. Some ten years later, he proved to be too idiosyncratic for the studio system and became an early independent film maker.

6-War as Adventure

As maybe hinted at by the audience reaction to The Red Badge of Courage, the American Public soon wanted to put the seriousness of war behind them, or maybe many hadn’t been that interested in the reality of war to begin with, so Hollywood began to work its “magic” on these films and soon they were left with little reality, but perhaps more entertainment. As Barbara Bush said, “War is not nice”, so an injection of entertainment and implausibility helped keeping it popular. Maybe the problems with validating the Korean War as an equally worthy war as WW2 also had something to do with it. (The American public was early on told that it would be a quick policing affair and scarcely a war at all. This was hardly the last time one “sold the fur before the bear had been shot”, as the Scandinavian saying a bit clumsily goes. The English-speaking part of the world can focus on counting unhatched chicken instead).

We can thank the British thriller novelist Alistair MacLean for giving us two of the best of these entertaining war films, of which the brilliant The Guns of Navarone (J. Lee Thompson, 1961) was the first adaptation of his work and Where Eagles Dare (Brian G. Hutton,1968) maybe the best in terms of pure escapism. Even though the film features stars such as Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton, I have to give a nod to Derren Nesbitt’s icy protonazi; SS-Sturmbannführer Von Hapen. Seldom have I seen a face more suited to the role! Nesbitt got his breakthrough in the WWI aviation film The Blue Max (1966), but never got any big roles after the MacLean-film.

These films spurred literally hundreds of copies, and just 1978 sees two of the more well known of these: The sequel Force Ten From Navarone (by Bond-director Guy Hamilton, who had made The Battle of Britain in 1968) and The Wild Geese (by John Ford’s old assistant director and the man behind quite some mediocre Westerns, Andrew McLaglen) but few have come close to the originals.

I ended up liking Von Ryan’s Express (Mark Robson, 1965) surprisingly much, seeing as it starred Frank Sinatra. It is an escape-film, but most importantly, it is the kind of action film they don’t make anymore. I was thoroughly entertained! One should also mention Kelly’s Heroes (Brian Hutton, 1970), which taught me never to look innocently on a Tiger Tank again. Not least, I must include already mentioned subversive director Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). The latter features some of the coolest actors ever (Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Donald Sutherland (even though he hasn’t been cool since 1978), Ernest Borgnine and, well, Telly Savalas. It was a very popular film all over the world and spurred numerous copies, of which the Italian B-movie Inglorious Bastards is well known, perhaps because it is being remade by Quentin Tarantino as I write this.

I feel that John Sturges’ POW-film The Great Escape (1963) also falls into this entertainment-category. It’s a bit of a strange film in that one sees the Germans as slightly cartoonish, but then the film turns decidedly bleaker after the eponymous escape has taken place. This seriousness is again offset by Steve McQueen’s histrionics on his motorbike, so in effect the film seems to be torn between war as realism and war as entertainment. Much of the same can also be said of the similar Stalag 17 (1953) by Billy Wilder, but this film keeps its tongue a bit more firmly in cheek and borders at times to satire. I’d like to advice most to try to see one of the better films about the war aspiring to be both entertaining and serious, namely John Frankenheimer’s The Train, with Burt Lancaster. I particularly like Paul Scofield’s protrayal of the German colonel, whose love of art and money bring him to desparation towards the end of the war in France.

(EDIT: And speaking of seriousness and quality in the genre, I should definitely not forget John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), with Lee Marvin and Kurosawa stalwart Toshiro Mifune. The story of two enemy soldier’s finding themselves marooned on the same island is a strong intimate story between the two protagonists that serves as a kind of metonymous tract on humanity by letting their initial animosity turn into pettiness and later respect. I can’t think of two other actors I’d rather watch for an entire film! The film is funny, tragic and exciting, and while these are standard adjectives, do believe this hype! Incidentally, the film was remade in 1985 by Das Boot-director Wolfgang Petersen. Curiously it had then become a science fiction film by the name of Enemy Mine. Here Dennis Quaid’s astronaut learns interspecies’ understanding in his meeting with Louis Gosset Jr.’s heavily made up alien soldier. It goes to show that other genres, like S/F and the Western, are often disguised war films, or allegories for ongoing conflicts. EDIT END).

7- War as Epic

The biggest war epic is a film that many perhaps don’t think of as a war film: David Lean’s excellent Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It deals with the real figure of T.E. Lawrence’s participation in the Arab revolt against the Turks in WWI. I would be hard pressed to name many better films ever made. It is a long film, but it needs to be long. The story it tells is truly epic in the sense that it deals not only with the life of a man, but with the transformation of that man into myth. However, from the sixties onward, many films dealing with war evidently needed to be very long films, while not always convincing me that this need sprung from the material itself. This is still true today, where it is seldom that a war film clocks in under the two hour mark.

The aptly named The Longest Day (also from 1962), starring every actor on the planet, is a three hour epic about the Normandy Invasion. It is told from the point of view of both sides of the conflict and is a solid, if not extraordinary film. A Bridge Too Far (1977) also goes on for three hours and has some splendid scenes, but as a film I feel it struggles to tell a coherent story. It wants to throw in any skirmish it can find and give cameos to as many known faces as possible. Anthony Hopkins’s character’s story seems worth following. Some images of his defence of the bridge – is it at Arnhem? (my memory fails me, as I’ve only seen the film once) – are truly memorable.

Zulu (1964) is also well past the two hour mark, but in this case I feel all the minutes are put to worthwhile use. This is an English film, with a very young Michael Caine, about a 4000 men strong Zulu attack on a field hospital defended by 139 British soldiers. The sound of the approaching Zulus stays with you! While it is these days difficult to feel sympathy for the British imperialists, the film is successful in that we come to admire this as one of the real historical “last stands”. Without this film, there would be no “battle of Helm’s Deep” in the Second of The Lord of the Rings-trilogy (The Two Towers). And, while we are celebrating British imperialism, I have to give a shout out to Henry Hathaway’s adventure film The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), which I thought almost shockingly good compared to many other contemporary films in this genre. I think it’s safe to say that Steven Spielberg watched this film prior to the first Indiana Jones-film. Stunts and war scenes are of a nature that I think most unions would forbid today. While the belief that the British were saviours to India and the – for the period – usual racist portrayals can seem jarring to modern sensibilities, there is actually much here to admire in terms of storytelling and a layered, and possibly subversive, plot. The film is about the British military fighting local war lords on the border to Afghanistan and, again, one can muse how little the world has changed. I can’t remember having seen many better films this year and actually want to rewatch it as I write this.

Viet Nam should have its own section here, but since I assume that most are familiar with these films anyhow, I’ll include them under the “epic” banner. Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (1966) is not about Viet Nam per se, but clearly at least allegorically linked. While not an unmitigated success, the film is often good and intermittently very good. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) lasts 153 American minutes and is deservedly a modern classic. The recently released Redux-version goes on for 202 minutes and, while adding some background for the characters and their actions, also takes some of the immediacy and momentum away from the film. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) is a good three hours and when I saw it again for about the fifth time recently, I felt it wasn’t quite as good as I once thought it was. It contains some exceptional scenes, but I’m not sure I like what the film is actually saying. Its view of America seems especially half-assed. The sentimentalization of small town values could have come from the mouth of Sarah Palin, and likewise some of the patriotism. Another film about Viet Nam was Go Tell the Spartans (1978), with Burt Lancaster, about the war prior to the bulk of US involvement.

By far my favourite of these epic films of the sixties and seventies is Franklin J. Schaeffner’s Patton (1970). Apart from letting us follow the great, but maybe not good, man through his worst and best times, the film also manages to say something about the nature of war and how it is mythologized. There are countless excellent scenes showing how Patton himself is obsessed with this self-mythologization, and I feel the film gives us a balanced and psychologically sound portrayal of the old warrior. The music by Jerry Goldsmith, in which he could “militarize” some of his ideas for Planet of the Apes (also directed by Schaeffner), which he had scored two years prior, is excellent and is so endemic to the war genre that it has been alluded to in almost all portrayals of the military thereafter, even finding its way into some episodes of the Simpsons. The staccato bugle is the sound of war from the first ever waged between warring tribes heralding their approach to the last anyone will ever die to see. Tellingly, Goldsmith’s score for First Blood, the first and best Rambo-film, also references his own earlier work. The short bursts of that signature trumpet line gives me goose bumps every time!

Patton is an example of The War Biopic, portrayals of real protagonists of real wars. It is almost a genre on its own, but doesn’t yet contain enough examples of quality, though there are some. Already in 1951, Henry Hathaway made The Desert Fox, about the latter days of one of the few admired German soldiers of WW2, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. James Mason did such a good role that he was called to repeat it two years later in Robert Wise’s The Desert Rats, about British soldiers, led by Richard Burton, trying to survive Rommel’s tactics. I feel that only the first film is truly good, not least because of some heart breaking scenes towards the end when Hitler has decided upon Rommel’s participation in the plot to kill him. A later example of the war biopic is MacArthur (1977), where Gregory Peck portrays the General as maybe too sympathetic. Peck also played the original Doctor Death, Josef Mengele, in The Boys From Brazil, but I don’t feel this is a war film even though it deals with Nazis. The same is true of John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976). It is about nazis, led by the dentist version of Mengele, Doctor Christian Szell, played by Laurence Olivier, hunting Dustin Hoffman in New York in the 70s.

Another sympathetic portrayal of the Germans with James Mason in a leading role is Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977), which shows the Russian front from the point of view of the German soldiers. I wish James Coburn had gotten more juicy roles like his Captain Steiner in this film. I’m glad Peckinpah was able to make the film, even though he had to finance it with the money from a German Porn producer and was reportedly drinking four bottles of vodka/whisky every day during the filming. He never made a good film again. Maximilian Schell, who plays Steiner’s cowardly rival, was at the time still mostly known for his role as a defence lawyer for the German war criminals in Stanley Kramer’s solid “message movie” Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). He also had a role in the so-so wannabe epic The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk,1958), in which we have the pleasure of hearing Marlon Brando speak English with an accent that is meant to be German. The Young Lions is mostly marred, though, by another Judgment at Nuremberg-actor, Montgomery Clift, whose eccentric portrayal of a character that is meant to be pretty normal rings false in many scenes. The strange effect, though, is that these scenes also become the most interesting. This film was among the first to show the liberation of the concentration camps, but doesn’t manage to convey the horror to the extent that Alain Resnais‘ short (and anti-epic) masterpiece Night and Fog (1955) does.

Now, I am sure that I have forgotten many films that someone out there feels should be included in this list. If some omissions are too glaring, let me know! I’ll soon come back with a shorter post about Asian and modern war films. “Our present business is general woe”, are we informed in King Lear. This is as fine a general description of the subject matter as we can hope for. Epictetus, one of my favourite stoics, calls Man “a pure soul burdened with a corpse”. I’ll venture, though, that if the films mentioned above have not helped us to avoid the proliferation of war in our age, they have at least made the burden recognizable and thus, perhaps, easier to bear.

We made our way across the sodden mess
of souls the rain beat down, and when our steps
fell on a body, they sank through the emptiness.

- Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto VI (translated by John Ciardi)

Much about Siegfried Sassoon’s wartime poetry suggests that he’d traveled through the depths of a Dantean pastiche. Yet, despite being clearly affected by his experiences in the muddy trenches of The Great War (and in which he was twice wounded), he lived a long life—the literary prime of which was wrought out of such times. The sense of multi-persona living that Sassoon inhabited is shown in the names of two memoirs he penned: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930).

In April of 1917 when Siegfried Sassoon returned to England from the front lines of World War I, he brought with him two important career-influencing effects: the Military Cross and a sense of disenfranchisement by shellshock. In the poems he would subsequently write about his experiences, images of death and dehumanization prompted by mechanized warfare were prevalent. Most aptly hellish are his descriptions of the mutilated human form.

In “The Rear Guard” (1917), Sassoon describes the frustration of a soldier navigating through the postscripts of battle. The second stanza:

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper’s arm a tug.
‘I’m looking for headquarters.’ No reply.
‘God blast your neck!’ (For days he’d had no sleep)
‘Get up and guide me through this stinking place.’
Savage, he kicked a soft unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Sassoon’s description shows the state of the soldier. The figure is “Groping along the tunnel, step by step” (in the first stanza), and “Alone he staggered on…” (in the third stanza). These phrases point toward a physical and psychological detachment, well known effects of intense combat. (This is a theme that was alluded to in my previous post discussing Sally Carrol’s predicament in Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace”). Normal sensibility and judgment are stripped; basic survival is priority; the human form becomes something as mud to be treaded upon, “muttering creatures.” This intimate understanding of an isolation from the normal leads me to believe that Sassoon experienced these feelings and psychological effects.

Sassoon’s style was sardonic at times, and showed an awareness of the dichotomies that pitted the ideals versus the realities of war; in “They” the Bishop notes after seeing the deformed bodies of the wounded, “The ways of God are strange!” Sassoon always attempted to reveal a learned-by-combat truth, perhaps one only learned therein.

“The General” (1917) shows Sassoon’s disdain for the military leadership:

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Of course, Sassoon is referring here to the wasteful way in which human and equipment capital were deployed by the generals. World War I is generally thought of as one in which the technologies had surpassed the strategies, leading to such stalemates as were experienced in the trench-fields of Europe.

Sassoon’s criticism of the ideals held by the citizenries of each side is evident in “Glory of Women” (1917)—which shows an acceptance of malleability as a way to describe the negatives of the war:

You can’t believe that British troops ‘retire’
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
O German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Commentary on the warped human and domestic forms is not unique to Sassoon.

Erich Maria Remarque’s scathing novel of the romanticization and realities of World War I, Im Westen Nichts Neues (1927), gives a picture of a group of Germans affected by the war. (Im Westen Nichts Neues is transliterated from German to “In the West Nothing New” but was popularized—and is known in English—as All Quiet on the Western Front). Here, the strength of autobiographical reflection is made through statements such as “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.” Remarque fought for the Germans and was wounded in the war.

One scene in his book describes an advance on a German position by French troops:

We recognize the smooth distorted faces, the helmets: they are French. They have already suffered heavily when they reach the remnants of the barbed wire entanglements. A whole line has gone down before our machine-guns; then we have a lot of stoppages and they come nearer.

I see one of them, his face upturned, fall into a wire cradle. His body collapses, his hands remain suspended as though he were praying. Then his body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang in the wire.

In 1930, Lewis Milestone adapted the book for film:

The students clear out of the classroom as they join the parade going on in the street. Milestone—and Remarque—offered substantive coverage to the soldier’s experience off as much as on the front lines. Image taken from Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

“Why did you risk your life bringing him in?”
“But it’s Behm! My friend…”
“It’s a corpse, no matter who it is.”
The recently recruited young men are in stark contrast to those affected by time spent in the trenches. Image taken from Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Retrospectively, the 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front is surprisingly realistic and violent for its time. In this image, the battle recounted by Remarque is presented in full effect by Milestone. Decapitation and dismemberment serve to separate and unravel the fibers of normal psychosocial constructs.

The main character visits home. Here, he is shown to be an avid lepidopterist. By this time in the story, he has matured, but his family and former school teacher hold on to an unshakable idealism.

The main character’s—and the movie’s—final moments are a clear indictment of the senselessness of the war. Image taken from Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

REFERENCES
1. Alighieri, Dante. The Inferno. Trans. John Ciardi. New York: Signet Classic, 2001.
2. All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. Perf. Louis Wolheim, Lew Ayres, John Wray. Universal Pictures, 1930. DVD.
3. Remarque, Maria Erich. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. A. W. Wheen. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1975.
4. Sassoon, Siegfried. “The Rear-Guard.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1961.
5. Sassoon, Siegfried. “The General.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1961-1962.
6. Sassoon, Siegfried. “The Glory of Women.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1962.
7. Sassoon, Siegfried. “They.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W W Norton & Company, 2006. 1960-1961.