Category: War film

Wooden Crosses (1932)

War’s horror is really palpable in this French WW1 classic, made by people who were there

Director: Raymond Benard

Cast: Pierre Blanchar (Gilbert Demachy), Charles Vanel (Corporal Bréval), Gabriel Gabrio (Suplhart), Raymond Aimos (Fouillard), Antonin Artaud (Vieublé), René Bergeron (Hamel), Raymond Cordy (Vairon), Marcel Delâite (Sergeant Berthier)

If you have any doubts about the deep scars World War One left on Europe, you can brush them off with a viewing of Wooden Crosses. Adapted from a gruelling novel by Roland Dorgelès, a former corporal in the 39^th Infantry Division, Wooden Crosses is really a version of Dorgelès own hideous experiences in the trenches. Although it was largely overlooked outside France – like Westfront 1918 it lives in the shadow of All Quiet on the Western Front – it had a huge impact on France, being screened for veterans and for the President himself, many of them reduced to tears.

It tells of the never-ending slaughter inflicted on the 39^th Infantry Division, partially through the eyes of a young law student Gilbert Demachy (Pierre Blanchar) who arrives determined to do his duty, even while under few optimistic ideals about the war. Introduced to the rest of his platoon by the gruff but fatherly Corporal Bréval (Charles Vanel) and cynical joker Sulphart (Gabriel Gabrio), Demarchy does his duty in several campaigns (with only brief respites from the front) while the soldiers around him die frequently and suddenly for a few more feet of mud.

Benard recruited actors and crew who had experienced the trenches, and Wooden Crosses is all about recreating the pitiless grimness of the front lines. The world the film creates is immaculately done in its grim squalor: the trenches are carefully reconstructed, a shelled-out church (“Our Lady of the Squaddies” as the troops call is) is perfectly sub-divided into a hospital (echoes of Pabst’s Westfront) for the wounded and dying and always the mud and desperation is palpable. The chances of heroism are few and far between, and the soldiers main goal seems to be to knuckle down and try to survive – even when the odds are impossible.

But, taking advantage of new film technology, it’s the sound of war that fills Wooden Crosses. The constant barrage of shells was carefully researched – after all each type of shell had a different sound – and long stretches of Wooden Crosses seem to be filled with nothing but the relentless pounding of the ears from mortar and shell fire. The horrific volume of war is captured here like few other films, which means the sudden bursts of near-silence carry real impact. For its in the silence we hear other sounds, the constant post-battle desperate pleas of the dying and wounded carried on the breeze. At one point Gilbert literally places his hands over his ears to drown out an incessant begging from a wounded comrade caught in No Man’s Land.

Its these moments that hammer home the soldier’s powerlessness. These people can’t be helped – that man making those sounds Gilbert has already had two attempts to rescue him, that just led to the death of the rescuers. Rescue is probably futile anyway. During a battle in a cemetery Gilbert risks his life to save another man, who promptly dies anyway – with all his pain, regret, anger and fear spewing out of him in front of his fellow soldiers. Powerlessness isn’t just listening to suffering: the platoon is forced to sit in their trenches listening to German miners digging beneath them, knowing the moment that digging sound stops their trench will be detonated – and that they can’t leave their post until their (disbelieving) officers give them permission.

No wonder they are hardened to battle. When a man dies in a foxhole, the others lift his body up to use him as a parapet. When an error in French artillery ranging means they end up firing on their own patrol, it’s met with irritation but muted acceptance that it’s just the way it is. There is a closeness among the soldiers, but it has that underlying current of knowing any of them could be gone forever at any time. When one of their late number receives a letter after his demise, the rest look away from the mailman with awkwardness, until Gilbert takes the letter to tear it up above the man’s grave.

Bernard visually contrasts this with some well-handled symbolism. He opens the film with rows and rows of soldiers, who transform in a single cut to rows and rows of crosses. The crosses become recurrent images. That battle in a cemetery is littered with them, hanging over or casting shadow over the characters, nearly all of whom are of course doomed. Bernard acknowledges the false excitement of the early mobilisation, with a montage of crowds rushing to volunteer to fight the good fight – but fades from this to a single image of an older woman staring out sadly from the camera, standing in for a whole generation of mothers about to lose their sons.

He ends the film – with our nearly last survivor piteously shedding his stoicism to die alone and afraid in No Man’s Land with a bullet in his belly – with a super-imposed montage of both stocks and shares and then wreaths tumbling past the screen (clear what he believes the motives and cost of war really was), before a final montage of soldiers carrying their crosses, Christ-like, through No Man’s Land. This meat grinder war, fought for profit, has left millions dead and for what? It’s hard to know or understand. And for all the soldiers never lose their determination to do their duty, never once do we get a sense of any patriotic idealism in them. No sense that anyone feels they are on a crusade, just a grim, unpleasant duty they need to get out of the way.

Wooden Crosses has a host of strong performances, each of them passionately committed. Pierre Blanchar is admirably reserved as Gilbert, his humanity tightly controlled below the surface. Charles Vanel is excellent as the gruff Sergeant, worried about his wife’s fidelity back home. Gabriel Gabrio makes his platoon cynic a man with a strong streak of decency. They are marshalled superbly by Bernard in a film full of power and despair at the horror men do.

The Pied Piper (1942)

A perfectly judged star vehicle, very slight and competent but entertaining enough

Director: Irving Pichel

Cast: Monty Woolley (Howard), Roddy McDowell (Ronnie), Anne Baxter (Nicole Rougeron), Otto Preminger (Major Diessen), J. Carrol Naish (Aristide Rougeron), Lester Matthews (Mr Cavanaugh), Jill Esmond (Mrs Cavanaugh), Peggy Ann Garner (Shelia), Merril Rodin (Willem), Maurice Tauzin (Pierre), Fleurette Zama (Rose), Marcel Dalio (Focquet), Odette Myrtil (Madame Rougeron), Marcelle Corday (Madame Bonne)

Talk about a part tailor-made for its lead. We need a curmudgeonly old duffer, with the twinkly charm of an avuncular uncle and a secret heart of gold – get Monty Woolley on the blower! In this Nevil Shute adaptation, he plays Howard, caught up in the 1940 German invasion of France while on a fishing holiday. With great reluctance, he agrees to escort Ronnie (Roddy McDowell) and Shelia (Peggy Ann Garner), children of a League of Nations diplomat, across France. Along the way, as well as dodging the Germans, he picks up a shell-shocked French orphan and a scrawny Dutch child and recruits the help of an old ‘acquaintance’ of his son, Nicole (Anne Baxter). Will Howard dodge the Germans and escape?

Woolley eases into this crusty old-timer with consummate ease – after all it’s essentially a twist on his star-making turn in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Howard might as well be the twin of Since You Went Away’s Colonel Smollett. But he can sell the heck out of characters like this, duly picking up an Oscar nomination. Introduced reluctantly helping Shelia with her homework – a running gag is Howard’s complete lack of knowledge of American geography, insisting Rochester is a state – he’s prickly around the kids, but not too prickly. Leaving us in no doubt that his gruff distance will soon melt on the road. Which of course it does, despite the occasional abrupt grumbling.

Not least since Woolley brings out a tender concern at how these kids are being exposed to the horrors of war. Little flashes of sadness as they see a dead body for the first time, and the sad understanding that crosses his face when he inspects the shell-shocked Pierre. Howard has a hard-won understanding of war, Woolley stiff of lip as he confesses the death of his RAF pilot son, mixed with pride that it took ‘three of them’ to take him down. It’s clear shepherding these children becomes, for him, the war service he was considered too old to do. We already know he’s got a determined never-say-die spirit, imperiously telling a surrender-monkey who joins him to listen to Churchill (a truly terrible voiceover impersonation) that he best never speak to him again.

Woolley is front-and-centre of nearly everything good in The Pied Piper, an otherwise fairly straight-forward mix of road movie, family adventure and war movie. It’s got a smoothly adapted script by Nunnally Johnson and competent, if uninspiring, direction by Irving Pichel. I found the film’s recurrent use of various predictable refrains – most irritatingly ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ – incredibly grating after a while. Most of The Pied Piper is all too obviously shot on studio sets, spiced up with the odd piece of stock footage. (Not surprisingly, considering it was shot while the world was tearing itself apart). Following in the spirit of its woeful Churchill radio impersonator, there are some desperately wobbly plane models super-imposed over a bombing raid on an evacuation convoy. It’s a swift and pacey film – but also a rather slight one.

Because The Pied Piper is only willing to go so far in showing the horrors of war. It will let its precocious children see a dead body but not us. The sense of peril, about what might happen to Howard if caught, isn’t quite there. Perhaps because it’s somehow implausible that anyone caught on the French-Swiss border in 1940 would think their best option was crossing occupied France rather than shooting across the border to Switzerland (those League of Nation parents must have been kicking themselves). The danger of Nazi pursuit only kicks in half-way through the film – until then, Howard doesn’t even bother to conceal his nationality. It’s not helped by The Pied Piper (like most 40s war films) totally failing to wrap its head around what a concentration camp is.

There is an episodic feeling to the film’s half, before most of the second half settles into a single location, with our heroes under the thumb of Otto Preminger dutifully trotting out one of his occasional angry Nazis. Along the way they pick up Anne Baxter, wrapping her tongue around an “ooo la la” accent that sticks out even more when several other members of the cast (including Marcel Dalio as a defiant fisherman) are actual refugee expats. But then part of the film’s family appeal is there isn’t too much peril.

The final act does introduce some – the introduction of a firing squad threat feels suddenly quite extreme – but also resolves all problems with the sort of contrivance that feels a bit like the story has been painted into a corner and without any other way to get out of it. There is a romantic innocence to it in some ways, the hope that any character could have a secret, sentimental weakness that might make them do a good thing. And the capture of our heroes does allow Woolley to showcase another weapon in his arsenal, his ability for proud, stiff-backed defiance in the face of evil.

The Pied Piper is sweet, charming, flies by quickly and offers a perfect, tailor-made star turn. The kids, thankfully, manage to not be too grating (in fact you even kind of wish Roddy McDowell and Peggy Ann Garner were given more to do). It’s a surprise to find a story so slight as this breathing in the vaulted air of the Oscar Best Picture short list, but it’s hard to argue against the relief of watching everyday heroism in the midst of war.

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)

Lusciously shot epic, that feels more like an adventure romance film than the political work the novel was

Director: Sam Wood

Cast: Gary Cooper (Robert Jordan), Ingrid Bergman (Maria), Katina Paxinou (Pilar), Akim Tamiroff (Agustin), Arturo de Cordova (Agustin), Vladimir Sokoloff (Anselmo), Mikhail Rasumny (Rafael), Fortunio Bonanova (Fernando), Eric Feldary (Andres), Joseph Calleia (El Sordo)

“No man is an island entire of itself” is the opening of John Donne’s Meditation XVII in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. That’s where the phrase “never seek to know for whom the bell tolls” comes from, and it lies at the heart of Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel, where he and hundreds of other like-minded individuals came together to (unsuccessfully) fight Fascism with self-sacrifice for the common good a calling card. After the novel became a hit, it’s not a surprise Hollywood came calling, moulding Hemingway into an expensively mounted blockbuster.

There was no question who would play the lead, stoic American Spanish lecturer and explosives expert Robert Jordan. After all, Gary Cooper was basically Hemingway’s model when he created the character. Ingrid Bergman beat off a string of competitors to play Maria, victim of Fascist assault, now living with partisans in the Spanish hills. Jordan joins these partisans, to blow a critical bridge. But the journey not only throws up romance for Robert and Maria but also troubles with guerilla leader Agustin (Akim Tamiroff), worried the mission will imperil what’s left of his people, and his wife Pilar (Katrina Paxinou) convinced the mission must be carried out.

Sam Wood, described as a near Fascist by Groucho Marx, seems an unlikely directorial choice for a film celebrating a group of Communist guerillas. But the Second World War makes for strange bedfellows. And, in any case, For Whom the Bell Tolls is less interested in politics than Hemingway. In fact, it practically bends over backwards to remove as many references about the political stakes as it can, re-crafting the book into much more of a men-on-a-mission romp, a tragedy-tinged Guns of the Navarone.

It’s a big-budget crowd pleaser, with a handsome, exotic setting beautifully shot by Ray Rennahan, who managed to make the Sierra Nevada mountains pass as the hills of Catalonia. Mix that with the tragic romance between Cooper and Bergman, in a series of beautifully-lit lingering shots, his reserved decency contrasted with her vulnerability and nerves. Interestingly, despite being hand-picked for the role, this is one of Cooper’s dullest performances, the neutered script removing many of the character’s doubts and fears. It’s only at the end, that Cooper is given any amount of real emotional depth to play with (even if it is via a rather forced voiceover), but otherwise Wood’s film crafts Cooper into the epitome of Fedora-wearing masculine toughness and stoic strength.

Ingrid Bergman fairs a little better as the Spanish lady who wins his heart. Unlike the rest of the cast playing Spaniards, Bergman isn’t caked in layers of brown make-up (something that looks particularly awful in Rennahan’s stylish filters), but the script plays up her character’s melodramatic elements. Bergman does her best to lend dramatic weight to this, but Wood’s film keeps pushing her towards tearful outbursts of fear at the possible loss of Jordan. For Whom the Bell Tolls makes a valiant effort at exploring Maria’s tragic background but shies away from the sexuality of the novel (it did after all coin the phrase “the earth moved”). It’s ironic Bergman was desperate to land this role, but now is best remembered for her other (Morocco-based) 1943 role.

What becomes clear the longer you watch For Whom the Bell Tolls is, that for all the handsome visuals and rich scoring of Victor Young, Wood can’t find the sort of poetic, narrative depth the source material demands. Put frankly, the literary and political force of the novel feels lost to him. It’s hard not to compare this to the sort of thematic depth Lean found in the far-less-complex story of Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s telling that what Wood delivers makes Hemingway feel more like a high-brow Alistair MacLean novel. This doesn’t mean For Whom the Bell Tolls isn’t frequently enjoyable: but it does feel Wood mistakes length and sweep for complexity and depth.

The film’s complete shelving of politics plays into this. There are half-hearted attempts to understand where the guerillas are coming from, but its telling that when it comes to atrocities, more screen-time is given to the past excesses of the communists – hurling decent representatives of the old regime off cliffs to their death – rather than the ruthlessness of the fascist oppressors (even though Jordan starts the film shooting a wounded comrade rather than let him fall into the hands of the Francoists). But it’s very possible to watch For Whom the Bell Tolls and not be completely sure when exactly it is set, or what the issues are everyone is fighting about. Can that be what Hemingway had in mind when it came to the screen?

Instead, guerilla drama boils down to questions of guts and character. Akim Tamiroff (Oscar-nominated, like Cooper) gives a fine performance of ambiguous bluster as a guerilla leader who may be concerned about the lives of his men, or may just have completely lost his nerve. Tamiroff is magnificently larger-than-life, with a streak of low-cunning mixed with cowardice. Katrina Paxinou won an Oscar as his wife, the fiercely determined Pilar who deals out romantic device with the same hard-boiled grit that she plans military actions. The guerilla leadership sways between these two throughout, with just enough tension between where they will land.

But For Whom the Bell Tolls remains, at heart, a men-on-a-mission film – something that feels quite reductive considering the passion of where it comes from. Everyone seems to still believe they are actually making a literary statement. The strained sense of self-importance behind the film can make it wearing, and its telling it is at its most engaging and emotionally fulfilling when emersed in action, be that a desperate stand by a group of guerillas in the mountains or the final assault on the bridge, with the heavy cost that brings to the group.

There is another world where For Whom the Bell Tolls could have united its epic scale, military action, doomed romance, passionate humanism and boys-own adventure into something that really coherent and deep, the sort of intellectual epic David Lean would win truckloads of Oscars for 15 years later. But it feels instead torn between echoing the melodramatic sweep of Gone with the Wind with the bravo-filled heroism of Sergeant York. It can’t really square that circle, making it, like the Spanish Civil War, a doomed noble effort. An inadvertent political point, more impactful than any in the film.

Viva Villa! (1934)

Despite some impressive moments, this largely fictional epic veers wildly in tone from scene to scene

Director: Jack L Conway

Cast: Wallace Beery (Pancho Villa), Leo Carrillo (Sierre), Fay Wray (Teresa), Donald Woods (Don Felipe), Stuart Erwin (Johnny Sykes), Henry B Walthall (Francesco Madero), Joseph Schildkraut (General Pascal), Katherine de Mille (Rosita), George E Stone (Emilio Chavita)

It’s not often a historical epic opens with text explaining pretty much everything you about to see in it is made up. But that’s what you get with Viva Villa!, nominally about the life of Pancho Villa, but so unconnected to real events that the Mexican government (who hosted a fair bit of the filming) called for it to be boycotted. This didn’t stop Viva Villa! becoming the biggest box-office hit of the year. This feels like bit of a mystery today with its strange mix of broad comedy, historical sweep and surrealist darkness. In other hands, it might have been a masterpiece (perhaps Howard Hawks’ hands, if David O Selznick hadn’t fired him and hired placemen Conway), but here it’s merely a competently executed semi-epic that works best if you accept its fictional.

As a boy, Pancho Villa (Wallace Beery) watched his father whipped to death by the Spanish Dons that rule the roost in Mexico. Now it’s the 1910s, and Pancho is a brutal bandit dishing out vigilante justice to the peasant’s oppressors. It takes a gentle man of vision, Francesco Madero (Henry B Walthall), to convince him there are better things to fight for than just grabbing a wife in every town. Pancho joins the revolution, helps place Madero on the (Presidential) throne – only to have his rival General Pascal (Joseph Schildkraut) orchestrate his banishment. But, when Pascal murders Madero, nothing is going to stop Pancho returning to wreak vengeance and bring justice.

Viva Villa may be, tonely, a very confused film (of which more later), but it undeniably has several moments of grand filming, James Wong Howe’s photography is a gorgeous parade of shadows, with scenes such as Villa’s unilateral execution of a parade of officials playing out with stream of light pouring from a window to cast gigantic shadows of hands and weapons on the walls behind them. Later war sequences, featuring further firing squads and executions, have a Goya feel to them with their thunderous dark lighting and towering shadows. The on-location shooting is impressively grand – so much so, it shows up the painfully unconvincing back projection that places Beery and others in front of troops of real armies.

However, the film never quite decides what to do with its hero (anti-hero?). Wallace Beery basically plays the same character he did in The Big House (but with a painful Mexeecan accent): a not-too-bright lug, with a capacity for violence and a childish sense of loyalty. The film never quite knows what to do with him. He’s introduced like a sort of Mussolini-strong man, cracking smiles when he has a group of “just following orders” officials gunned down in front of a ‘jury’ of recently executed peasants they have (not surprisingly) failed to convince. Like some sort of randy Speedy Gonzalez, there is a lot of fun had at his taking a wife in every town. He excuses his campaign of brutal violence during the revolution with a cheeky smile, like he’s been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. He leers over Fay Wray’s Teresa like a second King Kong and frequently kills with a smile and no second thoughts. He’s a ferocious force of destruction.

But then he’s given moments of genuine heroism. He accepts his banishment with a wry shrug. His loyalty is as highly praised as his “don’t take your hats off to me” egalitarianism. He’s presented as the sort of incorruptible, plain-speaker the country seems to need to solve its problems. Ahistorically becoming President, he remains uncorrupted, talks down his suitability for the job and humbly plays down his achievements – all while doing everything he can to protect those peasants rights. At moments like this, he’s less a chillingly ruthless men capable of great violence but a lovable rogue, bashfully pinching a minor treasure from the Presidential palace. But then he’s also a guy who a few moments earlier made an enemy for life by whipping Fay Wray half-to-death in a fit of frustrated lust (another scene making marvellous use of shadows).

There is no coherence to this: it feels like Villa is whatever the scene requires him to be in the moment. Moments of comedy land a bit awkwardly, when we’ve watched Pancho gun down a relatively inoffensive bank manager. And, vampish as Wray is, she hardly deserves her fate or the general indifference Pancho meets it with. The tone shifts feel awkward and jarring, just as the shifting of Pancho’s character feels random and calculated moment-by-moment. You can say the same for Madero, played with a wispy gentleness by Henry B Walthall: he’s partly a sort of secular-saint (with his own gently inspiring music), partly a naïve, weedy weakling who literally needs someone else to open his heavy office door whose enemies run rings run round him. At least Joseph Schildkraut, a preeningly camp villain caked in brown make-up, has a consistent character (even if its two dimensional) as an unashamedly selfish general, jealous of how much Pancho’s men love him. Similarly, socialist journalist John Reed is reimagined here in a tediously crude performance by Stuart Erwin as a barely competent drunkard.

It’s all part of what is a big, brash, crude epic that frequently aims for the crude, comic angles it can find whenever it can. Which is odd, as I say, for a film with such a ruthlessly high body-count (everyone from countless prisoners of war, weeping officials and even an inoffensive bank manager gets it) and has its vampish female lead fend off possible rape by our hero only to be beaten in silhouette and accidentally shot. What becomes clear in fact as it goes on, is that it seems to see Mexico as a country of wild, destructive children – like a sort of Lord of the Flies among the revolutionary set. Every Mexican character in it, except Manduro, is basically dirty, none-to-bright and impetuous (needless to say none of them are played by actual Mexicans).

Which, when you think about it, is a little uncomfortable (not helped by the fact the Spanish Dons – the likes of Donald Woods – all speak with comfortably refined mid-Atlantic accents). In that context, it’s less of a surprise to remember that the Mexican government basically banned it. There are several handsome moments of filming, and its scale is impressive, but with its tone varying wildly and a Beery lead performance that feels oddly out of place it only rarely works as well as it should.

Hell’s Angels (1930)

Hughes magnificent folly has stunning scenes of aerial combat, among it’s more functional dialogue scenes

Director: Howard Hughes (& James Whale)

Cast: Ben Lyon (Monte Rutledge), James Hall (Roy Rutledge), Jean Harlow (Helen), John Darrow (Karl Armstedt), Lucien Prival (Baron von Kranz), Roy Wilson (Baldy Maloney)

There is an old line about Orson Welles calling a film set “the biggest train set a boy ever had”. A feeling no doubt shared by Howard Hughes, one of the wealthiest men in America, who loved pouring his fortune into his private passions: fast planes and big movies. So, why not throw the two of them together into Hell’s Angels, the film which he planned to use to scoop recent Best Picture winner Wings title as the greatest fighter-ace film ever made. To get there, money would be no object at all.

Which meant Hughes didn’t think twice of reshooting most of the film over again when sound took over Hollywood. After all, why not put more money in: he had already spent millions on assembling a personal army of world-war-one planes, all of them frequently kept waiting on the ground for days on end (pilots and film crew sitting around collecting pay cheques) while he waited for the clouds to be perfectly positioned to best demonstrate the speed the planes flew at. Since he was waiting, why not bring in James Whale to re-shoot all the dialogue scenes with all the actual talking?

Whale came on board, fresh from directing Journey’s End on Broadway (after his work was finished, Hell’s Angels release was so further delayed he had time to shoot a film of that too and release it before anyone outside Hughes’ office saw a frame of Hell’s Angels), Whale first insisted the script be re-written. Hughes was more than happy with that, since I doubt he really gave a damn about the very-loose story used to join together the bits with the planes in. The cast was kept the same, bar one change: original female lead Greta Nissen’s Norwegian accent was judged impenetrable, so Jean Harlow was bought in to slip into something a little more comfortable in her place.

Not that it mattered particularly. The story of Hell’s Angels is simplicity itself. Two Brit brothers (though neither them or Harlow make any attempt to change their accents) join the flying corp at the outbreak of war. One brother, Monte (Ben Lyon), is a selfish, care-free rogue. The other, Roy (James Hall) is so painfully noble and dutiful (he even fights duels on behalf of the cowardly Monte) he’s nearly an idiot. Roy loves Helen (Jean Harlow) but is utterly unaware that she is nymphomaniac vamp who will do it with anything in a uniform – including Monte. Monte thinks war is a fool’s crusade, Roy considers it well-worth dying for – attitudes that will lead to a clash when they both volunteer for what turns out to be a suicide mission behind enemy lines.

None of this is particularly a surprise and, despite Harlow’s charisma, none of the three leads particularly stand-out on the acting front (though James Hall makes a decent fist of Monte’s big speech on the suicidal futility of war). Each of these characters is fairly thin in any case, and none of their actions carry any real surprise factor at any point. Whale shoots the dialogue scenes with a breezy competence, doing his best with material that on paper would hardly be winning any plaudits.

In fact, the most interesting thing about these scenes is how much it seems to subvert expectations of a martial flag-waver. It’s natural to assume the cowardly brother will either redeem himself or shown to be completely in the wrong, while the noble brother will be vindicated. In fact, Hell’s Angels ends up having more than a little sympathy with Monte who, while undeniably “yellow” (he looks terrified after his first solo flight and its downhill from there), is also given a fair bit of sympathy when he rants about war being murder and patriotism being just a word. It’s hard not to feel he’s right after watching the insane uber-nationalism of the German zeppelin crew who willingly fling themselves to their death to lighten their ship with cries of “Kaiser and Reich!” on their lips.

Just as it’s hard not to think Roy’s blind-nobility makes him less of a hero and more of a clueless buffoon. How he misses that Helen (who, at one point, staggers out of a bush immediately followed by an officer straightening his uniform) is as shallow as a puddle and faithful as a cat in heat is a complete mystery. It’s hard not to see him as a duped cuckold, cluelessly waiting for Monte in their digs (unaware Monte and Helen are currently going at it), or insanely obsessed with honour as he nearly gets himself killed fighting a duel in Monte’s place. It’s not surprising that (as Monte says) war is “like being drunk – it brings out who you really are”. It makes Monte increasingly wild and selfish, and Roy increasingly mule-like his in rigid following of form.

This subliminal interest is the best spark you can take from the otherwise fairly turgid dialogue scenes. The real interest is those dog fight scenes. And they remain outstanding today. There was no question Hughes wasn’t going to direct those – and he directed them from the sky himself, calling the shots from a plane amongst the action. These sequences are all stunningly assembled and genuinely compelling in their sense of speed and danger. There is also a real visual beauty to them: in particular a shot of a German zeppelin emerging from blue tinged clouds is awe-inspiring. The epic sweep of tight formation planes, swooping closely between each other, tailing each other, bullets flying and pilots whizzing by is brilliant.

And the film doesn’t shirk on the horrors. Flames – whether they come from machine guns or from burning planes – are hand painted yellow to make the destruction stand out. The human impact on the pilots is brilliantly captured. During these battles, pilots will burn or die with blood streaming from their mouth. Panicked flyers will gulp back shots of whiskey midair, or scream in agony as their bullet riddled planes and bodies crash to the ground. Planes ram into each other in fiery explosions, or streak bullets across each other. That’s not to mention the horrifying madness of that German zeppelin crew stepping into the oblivion of a long fall, pushed towards their fate by their fanatically insane captain (who has already sacrificed/murdered sympathetic German Karl – an old college friend of Monte and Roy – to lighten the zeppelin).

The dog fight sequences are compelling and if the drama on the ground never quite reaches these heights, in a way that’s only to be expected. For all the quiet subversion – and it’s up to you how much you think Hughes noticed or cared about that – they are functional moments to carry us to the drama in the skies. That’s what Hell’s Angels does best – and few have done it better.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Malick’s return from self-exposed exile is, for better or worse, a war film unlike any other

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Sean Penn (Sgt Edward Walsh), Adrien Brody (Cpl Geoffrey Fife), Jim Caviezel (Pvt Robert Witt), Ben Chaplin (Pvt Jack Bell), George Clooney (Captain Bosche), John Cusack (Capt John Gaff), Woody Harrelson (Sgt Keck), Elias Koteas (Capt James Staros), Jared Leto (Lt Whyte), Dash Mihok (Pfc Don Doll), Tim Blake Nelson (Pvt Tillis), Nick Nolte (Lt Col Gordon Tall), John C Reilly (Sgt Maynard Storm), Larry Romano (Pvt Mazzi), John Savage (Sgt McCron), John Travolta (Brig Gen Quintard)

There are war movies. And then there are Terrence Malick war movies. With The Thin Red Line Malick returned from a self-imposed twenty-year exile, during which his mystique had grown to mythical status. His return screened the same year Spielberg was widely credited as re-inventing the entire genre with Saving Private Ryan. But, while that was a visceral gut punch, The Thin Red Line makes its men-on-a-mission approach seem conventional. Malick’s film is a poem, musing on man’s place in nature, humanity, spirituality, good and evil – in fact anything except Dirty Dozen style shenanigans.

Set on the US invasion of Guadalcanal, it follows the men of a single company as they march and fight their way across the island, principally focusing its ‘plot’ on a two-day mission to capture a non-descript hill from a largely unseen enemy. In the smorgasbord of characters, Malick’s roving eye lights on a few key figures: the spiritually-minded, independent Witt (Jim Caviezel); Bell (Ben Chaplin) who day-dreams about the wife he left at home; Doll (Dash Mihok) a terrified blow-hard; stoic professional Sgt Welsh (Sean Penn) who holds the company together; feuding commanders, humanitarian Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and ambitious Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte).

But these characters are merely a jumping off point for a film that ruminates with sometime self-indulgent luxury, and bravely dares to suggest the ‘good war’ of World War II was a pointless, inhuman brawl that served little real purpose. Few war films start with peaceful shots of nature at work, featuring a crocodile drifting lazily through the waters (the same croc is later captured by the soldiers – no escape for nature from the war), lingering shots of birds and wildlife and one of its principal characters (Caviezel’s Witt), AWOL and paddling gently across a river, among an indigenous tribe.

The Thin Red Line draws a tender portrait of these indigenous people – whose calmly life is corrupted by conflict, not in terms of destruction but how the violence of war seeps into their culture. When Witt returns later, on leave after sterling front-line service, he finds these people clashing as never before, mirroring the brutal anger of the war he has left. In the film’s frequent, mumbling, ruminative voiceover, characters ask again and again where violence comes from – does it come from the same place as goodness? If you plug into this sort of thing – and some won’t – it can have a hypnotic power.

What makes The Thin Red Line unique among war films is that its real heart is in the poetry, full of deep, open-ended questions which are either unanswerable or mystifyingly oblique. It stretches as few others do for deeper spiritual answers. Malick adapted the film from a conventional war novel, by James Jones – but during the editing he jettisoned much of its plot (much to the shock of Adrien Brody, playing the novel’s lead character but reduced to a few lines) and leaned into the mystical, spiritual questions he was asking. Malick spotted earlier than any others the messianic, martyr qualities in Jim Caviezel, who is excellent as a rebelliously minded but deeply sensitive and spiritual man who senses instinctively his bond with the world around him.

The Thin Red Line touches throughout on the possibility of some benign – or otherwise – force that runs throughout existence and ties us all together. Malick frequently finds small moments where the soldiers become fascinated and irresistibly drawn towards nature, running their hands over leaves, admiring the waves, watching a bird dance from branch to branch… What, The Thin Red Line wonders, makes us turn from being part of a symbiotic whole, to shooting lumps out of each other? And for what? All for ‘fuckin’ property’ as Welch grouches?

As such it’s fitting the combat almost exclusively revolves a scuffle for Hill 210, a grassy pile that Malick never considers important enough to place in context or give us a clear view of. We are frequently mystified about how far up this lump of earth the soldiers have made, what is on the other side, or how it’s conquest will affect the war effort. Instead, this beautiful countryside surrounding – and Malick doesn’t stint on showing how gorgeous Guadalcanal is – serves to flag up even more the violence happening in it. The stunningly luscious photography by John Toll, becomes almost part of the point, hammering home the vicious inhumanity war brings into the natural world.

Instead, war focuses on brutal and trivial ends, that so often betray us into death. The hill’s main importance for Colonel Toll – a charismatically fierce performance of frustrated bitterness by Nick Nolte – is as a pathway to career advancement in a war he has waited his whole life for. Just as its essential pointlessness – it can be bypassed and taken in a slower flanking approach – means Koteas’ (a wonderfully measured performance) captain is unwilling to order his men into a suicidal attack. The phone clash between these two – a furious Nolte and a pressured Koteas trying to remain calm – is Malick’s most accessible narrative beat, expertly delivered.

In fact, the action and the epic sweep of the combat is a reminder that Malick may long to be a poet but he is also an astute and gifted narrative storyteller (when he chooses to be). For all the excitement of John Cusack’s Captain Gaff leading a charge up the hill, the film’s heart is the strange balance every character walks between the martial and mystical, between the call of nature and the grinding duty of killing. Qualities that can be seen fighting in Sean Penn’s fiercely professional sergeant who can weep at the tragedies around him, and fiercely attack the shallowness of the war they are wrapped up in. In fact, much of Thin Red Line feels like a Malick Art Project, a sort of rarefied air that you need to prep to make an expedition towards.

Of course, with all this to admire, it’s also hard not to deny that The Thin Red Line can also be long (and feel very long) and that it’s air of self-importance does, at times, wear the viewer down. It’s deliberately obscure and oblique narrative – not to mention that its voiceover is frequently rather hard to match to particular characters – can whiff somewhat of overindulgence. You could argue the essential message of the film – we’d all be better off if mankind could accept its place as part of a larger Gaia-like whole – is hardly re-inventing philosophy.

But it’s the undefinable, mystical whimsy of the film that makes it stand out – for good or ill. Since many – and, I’ll be honest, me as well sometimes – will find the films muttered whimsy carrying more than an air of self-important pontificating. Despite this, you can see why so many Hollywood stars were desperate to work on it – Travolta and Clooney have tiny cameos, several others hit the cutting room floor. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in Hollywood making a war film anything like this, to have the artistry to mix gunshots and birdsong and give equal weight to both. There are few films quite like it. So thank God for Malick, an artist who has a distinctive voice, the courage to commit to it and the skill to pull it off. The Thin Red Line has moments that few other Hollywood film makers have matched in their whole career – and that alone makes it a film to hold tight and cherish.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Brilliant epic, one of the greatest films ever made – not to mention possibly my all time favourite

Director: David Lean

Cast: Peter O’Toole (T. E. Lawrence), Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali ibn el Kharish), Alec Guinness (Prince Feisal), Anthony Quinn (Auda Abu Tayi), Jack Hawkins (General Edmund Allenby), José Ferrer (The Turkish Bey), Anthony Quayle (Colonel Harry Brighton), Claude Rains (Mr Dryden), Arthur Kennedy (Jackson Bentley), Donald Wolfit (General Archibald Murray), I. S. Johar (Gasim), Gamil Ratib (Majid), Michel Ray (Farraj), John Dimech (Daud), Zia Mohyeddin (Tafas), Howard Marion-Crawford (Medical officer), Jack Gwillim Club secretary)

There is no beating around the sand dune. Lawrence of Arabia is probably my favourite film of all time. It’s also the apogee of David Lean’s career and, arguably, the entire genre of epic film-making. No other epic is as massively, awe-inspiringly grand as this and perhaps no other combines the stunning scale with such intense, fascinating and astute character insight. It’s a film that succeeds on every front and leaves any viewer with such a searing visual impression that, once seen, it’s almost impossible to forget. And, of course, everyone should see it.

It was decades in the making before Sam Speigel and David Lean marshalled it to the screen. Based on TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it’s strikingly modern in that it’s a biography of Lawrence without attempting the full cradle to grave. Instead, told in what it’s easy to forget is interrogative flashback after Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident, it focuses exclusively on Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole) campaigns with the Great Arab Revolt during World War One – but in a style heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s fast-and-loose approach to history, where events drill down into that elusive question: what sort of man exactly was Lawrence? In other words: “Who are you?”

And fascinatingly for a film increasingly misremembered today as some sort of imperialist fan-fare blower or white saviour narrative, the answer is frequently not particularly flattering. In line with his historical self, this Lawrence is a deeply conflicted figure, perfectly captured in Peter O’Toole’s breath-takingly superb performance as a quirky, thoughtful introvert who frequently role-plays as an extrovert barrelling into the limelight. He’s a man capable of staggering insight, devoid of the knee-jerk racism of his fellow Brits. But he’s also a bombastic egotist with a major messianic complex who compares himself to Moses. That’s not even touching on his repressed sexuality, sadism or his deep discomfort at his in-built relish for violence and bloodshed.

Throughout O’Toole treats triumph with a giggling schoolboy relish, then collapse into dead-eyed, silent gloom when grimmer repercussions emerge. It’s a stunning performance, and fascinating figure to set at the centre of a war epic. O’Toole’s Lawrence is handsome, charismatic and a genius – but also fey, camp even, nervous, confident only when he is in control, likely to collapse into nervous giggles when things go wrong. O’Toole also brilliantly conveys the growing darkness and cruelty in Lawrence, shocked and appalled by his excited relish in killing Gasim or his excited anticipation at the slaughter of a group of Turks. It feeds an ego that believes he is above normal men, stunned at the moments when he discovers he is not, that leads him to ever darker determination to prove he can change the world through will alone.

Lean’s film is remarkable in how it presents Lawrence’s achievements with the jaw-dropping marvel they deserve – but also in showing his failures, cruelties, delusions. It’s remarkable how often Lawrence is punctured or bought-down after moments of success – especially as any moment of success has him even further convinced of his own genius. His saving of Gasim in the Nefud desert is followed shortly after by his executing the same man to preserve the fragile peace in his Arab coalition. His conquest of Aqaba is followed by guiding his teenage servant Daud into quicksand. A successful attack on a Turkish train is followed by getting his other teenage servant, Farraj, killed. His almost suicidal pride in entering Derra alone dressed as an Arab, leads to his capture, beating and rape by a perverted Bey (a lip-smackingly sinister cameo from Jose Ferrer, who considered this his finest performance).

Is there an epic film more cynical and critical about British Empire building than Lawrence of Arabia? Away from Lawrence, the Brits are represented by the Blimp-ish Murray (Donald Wolfit in fine form), Allenby (a marvellous Jack Hawkins) who doesn’t let principle get in the way of duty and a duplicitous Dryden (a magnificently austere Claude Rains). Both Allenby and Dryden well understand the game they are playing (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) – help the Arabs, but not too much, bring them together, but not too much, get rid of the Turks put the Brits in their place. Lawrence of Arabia is far from a flag-waver, presenting a cynical, two-faced view of rapacious Empire building. Its even uncomfortably rejected by Anthony Quayle’s endearingly straight-forward Colonel Brighton (who stands out as the film’s most honourable character).

In comparison, the Arabs are seen as perhaps naïve and chaotic, but largely honourable and honest and their campaign for independence and self-government is presented sympathetically (only their most Westernised representative, Alec Guinness’ reserved Prince Feisel, can match Dryden and Allenby in ruthless politics). There is a vibrant genuineness in Arab culture, even if it’s also shown to be as full of bitter hierarchical rivalries between tribes as the British are in their club memberships. Much of this is captured in Omar Sharif’s extraordinary performance as Sherif Ali (a sort of Arab version of Lawrence, both introverted and extroverted), a man of deep principles whose discomfort grows with Lawrence’s increasing wildness.

Lawrence’s unpredictability is what the film circles round to again and again. It’s fascinating both how flawed and unknowable he becomes. You only need to look at his costume: in ill-fitting military outfit, the trousers too short, O’Toole feels utterly out-of-place compared to his comfort in flowing white robes. But those robes become progressively more filthy, transparent and ghost-like the longer the film goes on. Does any other epic lay so bare the complex sexuality of its hero, his sado-masochistic desires (“the trick is not minding it hurts” indeed!), his part-shame, part-excitement about his assault by the Bey, his unmistakeable relish for death?

It’s striking how Lean so frequently frames Lawrence as unseeable: watch the Act 2 train attack, where we see Lawrence from behind, his feet striding along a train and then his body framed with the sun behind him. Or the film’s conclusion that turns him into even more of a ghost, a spectral figure behind a curtain and a jeep passenger almost invisible behind a mud-smeared windscreen. It’s extraordinary visual work to communicate a depth of theme. Constantly, he’s framed as a figure shrinking into the chaos, slipping through our fingers when we think we understand him.

That’s in a film crammed with extraordinary images. “No Arab loves the desert” are true words, but Englishmen do and Lean certainly did. His shooting of this vast panorama of dunes and sand is second to none. Is there a greater shot in history than the slow arrival of Sharif from the wavy mirage mists of the desert? That stands out in a film of extraordinary images: Lawrence’s progress through the mountains; the tracking shot of the attack on Aqaba, that ends on the powerless guns; a train puffing through the desert; even the small moments – Lawrence’s goggles dangling on a branch after his accident is a gorgeously simply, brilliantly evocative image. Everything in Lawrence is perfect technically: John Box’s superb sets, Maurice Jarre’s breathtakingly evocative music; Anne V Coates flawless editing (witness one of the greatest cuts of all time).

But it’s always bought back to the sharp critical eye on its lead, powered by Robert Bolt’s superbly iconoclastic script and Lean’s directorial discipline. This is a film that mirrors Lawrence’s playful dance in his new robes, stopping to admire himself in the reflection of his dagger with Lawrence, 90 minutes of screentime later, echoing the gesture to stare in horror at his blood-soaked clothing. That makes its last military action not the capture of Damascus, but Lawrence’s brutal massacre of retreating Turks at Tafas. Which ends with its hero covered in failure and sent packing as an awkward figure in the new age by both sides.

It’s a huge thematic complexity that gives Lawrence the chance to cement itself as one of the greatest films ever made. With its matchless technical brilliance, it brings a sharply insightful, critical eye to its lead and resolutely refuses to indulge in any hero-worship at all. It brings great depth and passion to its portrayal of the Arab people (I will grant Guinness’ casting today is unfortunate – less so with Quinn who was always ethnically ambiguous and is knock-out, charismatically brilliant), showing them as warts and all but rejecting the temptation to present them as a noble but simple people, but instead of a rich, non-Westernised culture forced to play by someone else’s rules. Lawrence marshals this while constantly leaving us questioning and changing our mind about the lead character, so superbly bought to life by O’Toole you could make a case for it as one of the greatest performances of all time. You can certainly make the case for the film as one of the greatest, a stunningly assembled, wonderfully directed, breathtaking mix of spectacle and character study that rewards the viewer every single time they see it.

Sahara (1943)

Bogart does desert warfare, in this tense, very well-made war film both men-on-a-mission and a siege film

Director: Zoltán Korda

Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Sgt Maj Joe Gunn), Bruce Bennett (Waco Hoyt), J. Carrol Naish (Giuseppe), Lloyd Bridges (Fred Clarkson), Rex Ingram (Sgt Maj Tambul), Richard Nugent (Captain Jason Halliday), Dan Duryea (Jimmy Doyle), Carl Habord (Marty Williams), Patrick O’Moore (Bates), Louis Mercier (Frenchie), Guy Kingsford (Stegman), Kurt Kreuger (Captain von Schletow), John Wengraf (Major von Falken)

Sahara was ripped from the headlines: with the war still in full swing. So much so, it not only told a tale of a battle effectively still being fought but is also perhaps the only American film in existence to credit a Soviet film for providing the original story. It’s 1942 and the British army are in full retreat from Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Among them is Sgt Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) and his tank Lulubelle, one of a small group of American tanks getting some real life combat experience with the Brits. Heading South through the desert, Gunn and his crew, Waco (Bruce Bennett) and Joe (Dan Duryea), pick up a motley collection of Allied soldiers led by Captain Dr Halliday (Richard Nugent) including Sudanese sergeant Tambul (Rex ingram) and his Italian prisoner Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish). All of them are caught between two enemies: the Germans and the complete lack of water in the desert.

Sahara is an exciting, assured war film that combines a ‘men on a mission’ set-up with a classic ‘base under siege’ setting. Our heroes eventually find themselves at a dried-up desert well and the target of a desperately thirsty German battalion. Gunn decides to hold the dry well to slow the German advance down, fighting a gruelling siege, desperately waiting for relief, as the battle takes a terrible burden. This is Boys Own Adventure stuff, but told with a genuinely affecting sense of duty and sacrifice, as our heroes knuckle down in impossible circumstances.

At the heart of it, Bogart delivers exactly the movie star charisma the film needs while. Rudolph Maté’s photography is extraordinary, transforming the Californian desert into the African sands. Sahara brilliantly understands the importance of resources in the desert, and Korda captures perfectly the sweaty, sand-covered desperation for liquid. Sahara is tense, exciting and surprisingly hard-hitting with a strong cast.

What it really is of course, is a celebration of the attitudes that separate the Allies from those nasty Nazis. The Allies are a smorgasbord of nationalities, all of whom are shown (after some clashes) to work together with respect, admiration and a shared sense of purpose. Richard Nugent’s medical officer modestly defers leadership to the tank-and-combat experience of Bogart’s sergeant – no awkward arguments of seniority. Despite the collection of Americans, Brits, a South African, a Free Frenchman, a Canadian and a Sudanese sergeant, there is almost no trace of either national or racial clashes.

These men work in partnership, deferring to other’s areas of expertise to survive. Rex Ingram – excellent as Sergeant Tambul – instantly proves himself invaluable with his survival knowledge and ability to locate water. It’s Tambul who is at the heart of a tense search for any moisture in the seemingly dried up well our heroes hole up at, and later he is pivotal in the defence of the well. Saraha has a marvellously low-key but affecting scene of cross-cultural understanding as Tambul and Bruce Bennett’s Texan Waco jokingly compare outlooks on the world that are far more similar than they expect.

The message here is clear: teamwork, respect and the ‘dignity of freedom’ gives the Allies the moral edge over the Axis. The supportive respect, good humour and unflashy bravery of the Allies who get on with it and put duty first while respecting the rules of war is contrasted with the Germans. Bogart may flirt with the idea of abandoning Giuseppe in the desert (to preserve their water supply) but of course, when push comes to shove, he won’t (as Waco and Jimmy suspected he wouldn’t). Later, Bogart will even share the same limited water ration with their German prisoners.

Compare and contrast with the Germans. Their main representative, captured pilot von Schletow (played with a wonderfully smug viciousness by Kurt Kreuger), is portrayed as an instinctive racist (he’s the only character to make any slur towards Tambul), a bully and fanatic. There’s very little trace of decency in him: he’s confrontational, two-faced and dripping with nationalist superiority. The other Germans we see aren’t much better: a German soldier turns on his companion for a drop of water, a senior German officer breaks on a truce and the Germans fight as individuals rather than a supportive unit.

Caught in the middle? The Italians, represented by Giuseppe. J. Carrol Naish is excellent (and Oscar-nominated) as a soldier a million miles from Kreuger’s fanatic: a family man who keeps his word and just wants to go home. Naish has two knock-out scenes: the first a desperate pleading to Gunn to not be left to certain death in the desert and the second a contemptuous denunciation of German fanaticism to von Schletow: as he puts it, it’s a job to the Italians but a way of life to the Germans. Perhaps it was easier (with America’s large Italian population) to give the Italians more of a pass, but it allows the film to suggest there is some hope that behind the fanatics stood many regular people (something it’s hard not to see mirrored in the desperate German soldiers).

Sahara marshals all of this into a final siege that threatens to head the film into very dark territory indeed. Death is a constant in Sahara: the film opens with a view of the wreckage of battle, the unforgiving harshness of the desert is constantly stressed and we are shown repeated images of makeshift graves as bodies pile up and it becomes clear no-one is safe. Many heroic deeds have fatal outcomes and there is a hardened realism to the fighting. Like the Allies, the viewer ends up hoping for a miracle. It’s makes for a gripping and overlooked war film, that provides a genuinely hard-hitting taste of how unforgiving war can be. Tense, well-filmed and exciting it’s a little gem.

Westfront 1918 (1930)

Wonderfully filmed, but grim and slightly too allegorical war film, sitting in All Quiet’s shadow

Director: GW Pabst

Cast: Fritz Kampers (The Bavarian), Gustav Diessl (Karl), Hans-Joachim Moebis (The Student), Claus Clausen (The Lieutenant), Jackie Monnier (Yvette), Hanna Hoessrich (Karl’s wife), Else Helle (Karl’s mother), Carl Ballhaus (Butcher)

If there is one thing you definitely understand when watching Westfront 1918, it’s the impact of the First World War on ordinary Germans. Westfront 1918 is low on plot and is close to an experience film, following four regular soldiers ground down by the military campaign on the trenches, with horrific psychological and physical injuries which will leave most of them dead (or as good as). Our soldiers are Karl (Gustav Diessl), a husband who discovers his wife has found comfort at home in the arms of the local butcher, the young Student (Hans-Joachim Moebis) in love with Yvette (Jackie Monnier), a rotund Bavarian joker (Fritz Kampers) and the tightly-strung Lieutenant (Claus Clausen) under huge pressure.

The inescapable comparison Westfront 1918 lives with is to All Quiet on the Western Front (shot almost at the same-time). Unfortunately, the novel Westfront 1918 is based on is not as strong as Erich Remarque’s and the film goes for such an allegorical universality in its characters (most of whom don’t get names) that it doesn’t carry the same powerful emotional impact. All Quiet also shows its characters going from hope to disillusionment: what Pabst is going for, with unrelenting grimness, is to show disillusioned men stuck in a pointless slaughter, fighting a distant and faceless enemy.

All they is chaotic uncertainty and the suddenness of death. The story is topped and tailed with different types of incompetence and inadequacy. Our heroes, on a brief leave near the front, are forced to hit the basement after their occupied village is shelled by their own artillery (this fuck-up will be repeated again and again, to the exasperation of the Lieutenant as his men duck in the trenches from their own shells). The film climaxes in an over-crowded, shelled-out church acting as field hospital, with over-worked doctors and inadequate medical supplies struggling to save lives. Stressing how much this is a hell on earth, the camera pans past a shattered Christ statue in the rubble. This dance with death isn’t just pointless, it’s ineptly led.

The combat sequences are shot with a strikingly observant camera, soaking up the detail, the soundtrack (and the ground) constantly peppered with exploding shells. Pabst stages our arrival at the trenches in a striking tracking shot, stressing their narrowness and inhospitality and the flimsy protection they provide. The final battle that closes the film – a French tank advance against hopelessly outmatched Germans – includes brilliant stationary shots that hold a fixed view of the battlefield. In front of us march (and run) troops – but also, when troops are hit, their bodies slump and remain there in shot, sprayed with mud when shells explode. Slowly the frame fills with the detritus of war. It’s an extremely well-done capturing of the grimness of war.

Pabst’s film stresses the unfairness and dismissal of the ordinary soldier by the officers. Senior officers are based miles from the front, fighting a very different war: pushing troops around a map and enjoying fine rations, served by batmen. When the Student struggles into their presence with a message after a harrowing journey, they barely register his presence: he’s left slumped on the floor and only fed when the batman sneaks him some food. Everyone is not equal and the soldiers there is no point volunteering for things (the student has only taken on his hazardous mission in the hope he can steal away afterwards to see Yvette).

The homefront is equally troubled, crowds queuing for low rations and those left behind struggling with the loneliness and shame (as millions die a few miles away). Pabst’s film also treats those on the homefront as victims. When Karl’s wife is found in an adulterous twist with a butcher, Westfront 1918 gives as much sympathy to her loneliness and depression as much as it does Karl’s rage. In fact, if anything, Karl’s fury towards a woman he hasn’t seen in 18 months finding some comfort is held up as his character flaw, something he will spend time deeply regretting later. What does a passing moment like this matter when you could be killed at any time? Pabst’s argues we should stick together as Komarades, not turn on each other.

The film’s main weakness is the characters largely act as ciphers and universally representative figures. Westfront 1918 never quite manages to make them people we really care for in themselves, even as they fall. Which isn’t to say the tough moments don’t land: one character’s fate, drowned in a pool of mud, only his hand sticking limply out after death, is especially tough. The impact of death land (literally so in one shot which drains out the light to leave one character’s face literally looking like a skull) but, unlike All Quiet, we never quite feel like we fully know and understand these men.

This is perhaps why Pabst’s film is now most strongly remembered for its technical innovations. His first sound film, Pabst didn’t want his camera to be restricted into a stationary position so that a sound boom could pick up the sounds. He and cameraman Fritz Arno invented a sound-proof casing for the camera to allow them to move. In doing this, Pabst re-introduced much mobility to sound film-making.

Westfront 1918 is a film full of admirable film-making virtues and a strong streak of humanity. It doesn’t carry quite the same emotional impact as All Quiet – and it will always be remembered as that’s companion piece – but it has moments of haunting, virtuoso film-making. It’s view of war as a pointless grindstone inevitably led to it being banned by the Nazis. But it’s also sad to reflect that Pabst spent the next war (reluctantly) filming propaganda films for Joseph Goebbels. As Westfront 1918 tells us, life is cruel.

Decision Before Dawn (1951)

Tense war drama finds sympathy for the enemy, in an over-looked war film

Director: Anatole Litvak

Cast: Richard Basehart (Lt Dick Rennick), Gary Merrill (Colonel Devlin), Oskar Werner (Corporal Karl Maurer “Happy”), Hans Christian Blech (Sgt Rudolf Barth “Tiger”), Hildegard Knef (Hilde), Wilfried Seyferth (Henitz Scholtz), Dominique Blanchar (Monique), OE Hasse (Oberst von Ecker), Helene Thimig (Paula Scheider)

Decision Before Dawn tends to be remembered – if it is remembered – as an aberration in Hollywood history, one of the few films to receive only one nomination other than its Best Picture nod – with that nod generally put down to excessive Fox executive lobbying. I’d heard it described as a ‘fairly standard World War II film’ and expected it to be pretty disposable. But I guess I should have looked into things more: no less a director than Stanley Kubrick called it a hidden gem, claiming to have seen it five times. After a viewing, it’s hard not to think he might be right.

It’s a real, peeled-from-the-headlines tale. Shot entirely on location in Germany, in the very cities its characters are travelling through, still the bombed-out wreckage sites they were in 1944. With the assistance of (what was still then) the Occupying Powers, Fox and Anatole Litvak (himself a one-time refugee from the Nazis) recreated, to an astonishingly convincing degree, war-torn Germany six months before the death of Hitler, on locations littered with Germany military equipment. Everything in Decision Before Dawn feels astonishingly real because it largely is. When “Happy” tumbles through a bombed-out theatre or walks through bedraggled factories and grand houses converted to military bases, that’s the real thing.

Alongside this visceral sense of realism, is a surprisingly mature message. Helped by the presence of several German ex-pats, Decision Before Dawn casts a sympathetic eye over the Germans at a time when most of viewers would probably echo the initial sentiments of Richard Basehart’s scornful Lt Rennick: ‘they’re all just Krauts’. Rennick’s is part of an intelligence unit, tasked with ‘flipping’ German POWs and sending them back into Germany. Their two latest recruits couldn’t be more different: cynical Sgt Barth aka Tiger (Hans Christian Blech) motivated by earning a quick buck and thoughtful Corporal Maurer aka Happy (Oskar Werner) who believes Germany can only be saved when the madness of Nazism is defeated.

It’s Happy we follow when, after his recruitment, he is parachuted back into Germany and instructed to find the location of the XXth Panzer corp, while Rennick and Barth land further West to locate, and arrange the surrender of, a Wehrmacht Army Unit. Decision Before Dawn has already spent its opening act humanising erstwhile opponents via Happy. Happy is honest and principled with a strong sense of morality. He won’t lie to please his captors but he also won’t countenance the blind loyalty or bitter cynicism of his fellow prisoners. He is brave enough to save his country by ‘betraying’ it.

And it’s through Happy’s eyes we also see Germany. Many of his fellow POWs have no real love for Nazism; far from slathering fanatics, they are just guys knuckling down, wanting to stay alive. Behind-the-lines in Germany, the people Happy meets on his journey are striking in their everyday ordinariness. Decision Before Dawn’s most compelling sequences follow this ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ through the Reich, where episodic encounters mix with moments of panic and terror as a Gestapo net draws tighter.

The only two true believers he encounters are a glasses-wearing (it still loves some of the cliches) relentless Gestapo officer, and a Hitler Youth kid who still swallows true loyalty to the Fuhrer because he doesn’t know anything else. The others, by and large, are ordinary people trapped in a nightmare, trying to carry on. From a senior officer who reluctantly executes a deserter days before he knows the army will surrender to a depressed widow trying to make a living turning tricks. They are among a parade of regular citizens who, other than that fact they are commuting through a war zone, could be no different from Americans in their everyday concerns.

This places much of the film’s success on the shoulders of Oskar Werner, making his English-language debut. Werner, himself a deserter opposed to Nazism, brings the role a quiet, deeply affecting sincerity, expertly breathing life into a man who lives by his own firm moral code. ‘Happy’ deplores the taking of life but will do so if there is a reason: that won’t involve poisoning a colonel or standing by during the lynching of a POW by his fellow prisoners, but he will turn a gun on a direct threat. Werner makes him a thoughtful, compassionate man while giving him a strong streak (a Werner speciality) of in-built martyrdom, that a feeling he is too strait-laced and honourable for this world.

By making our hero a German – and the character we follow for almost the whole movie (despite Basehart’s top billing) – Decision Before Dawn is invites it’s American audience to emphasise with the enemy. To learn, alongside Rennick, that they are not ‘all Krauts’ so that we and Rennick can both be appalled by the unfairness when a Corporal mutters this at the film’s. That’s quite a thing for an American film, a few years after the war. By giving us handsomely staged spectacle centred around a man most of the audience were primed to expect to turn traitor, rogue or coward is no mean feat.

Of course, not every German can be good. The other potential recruits (one of them a young Klaus Kinski) are not a promising bunch and ‘Tiger’ (a fine, weasily performance by Hans Christian Blech) is betrayed as selfish, cowardly and perfectly happy to sacrifice anyone and everyone around him to ensure his safety. Litvak’s film does acknowledge it’s easier for the Americans to relax their feelings for the Germans than many of the other nations of Europe. Dominique Blanchar’s OSS officer makes it perfectly clear that, while she likes ‘Happy’, she’s still a long way from every imagining a relationship with a German of any sort.

Decision Before Dawn is well-directed, Litvak easing expert tension behind-the-lines and wonderfully shot among the ruins of Germany. Its final resolution may seem a little pat and obvious – and Basehart’s Rennick is such a terminally dull character I can only assume a host of more famous actors turned it down – but there is a lot of rich, fascinating tension and excitement here. Putting it frankly, Decision Before Dawn is a very pleasant surprise: a unique and mature war film that deserves far more recognition.