BEFORE: Another World War I film, and while I can't say that I'm enjoying these war films all that much, this film was an Oscar winner for Best Picture, so that sort of demands some attention. I'm over the hump on Best Picture winners, after this there will just be 30 films I haven't seen out of the 84 winners. I think I can link actors from "Paths of Glory", since Kirk Douglas was in the 1970 film "There Was a Crooked Man..." with Lee Grant, who was also in "Damien: Omen II" with Lew Ayres. My thanks tonight to the Oracle of Bacon for providing the link.
THE PLOT: A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I.
AFTER: Another war film that was tough to watch, and tough to get a handle on, quite frankly. This film was released in 1930, at the cusp of the "talkies" era, and is not really a full-sound film, but not really a silent film, either. It's got dialogue cards like a silent film would, but it's got music and sound, which is synchronized to the images, but was added later and not recorded on set. It's kind of like an early Model T car that had to be pulled by a horse - the technology is there, but it's not fully functional yet.
It's hard to look past this weird format and judge the film on its merits, but I'll try and give it a go. The question becomes, does this film work as a narrative? It starts out as a story about 5 young soldiers, but as the war takes its toll in various ways, the cast keeps dying off. (SPOILER ALERT: soldiers died in World War I) Eventually the focus is on the one or two characters left - but it's still a weird way to run a film.
It sort of works as a series of war-set anecdotes - the struggles for food, the visit from a commanding officer, flirting with French women - but as a start-to-finish story, it doesn't seem to hold up. Or maybe it's just too depressing. Wait, is that the point?
According to the introductory segment that ran on TCM, this was made as an anti-war film, but by the time it was released war was looming again in Europe, so the film got sort of unsuccessfully re-purposed as a pro-war film. There sure is a big gap between the war experience the young soldiers were promised, and the one that they got - it's hard to see any positive aspects of soldiering. There must be some, right?
For the kids, I suppose this serves as an archive on the ways war used to be fought, before smart bombs and drone planes and super long-range missiles. Yes, people used to fight up-close and personal, diving into a trench in the ground to kill someone with a knife. If it seems barbaric, that's because it was. And maybe that's the point. But it's tough to make an anti-war film without being preachy - this film sure couldn't do it.
Also starring William Bakewell, Ben Alexander, John Wray, Louis Wolheim.
RATING: 3 out of 10 spools of barbed wire
No comments:
Post a Comment