FRENCH WARS Movie Review

French Wars on Screen

To most American moviegoers, the words “French film” imply a certain air of delicacy and intellectual snobbery, possibly mixed with sex—everything that the French war film is not. From the 1960s on, these movies have been notable for their hard, semi-documentary approach and tightly controlled emotions. They've also been based on a sophisticated political awareness that's seldom seen in similar American films.

The first major work is Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoleon, restored to a version approaching its full length by Kevin Brownlow in the early 1980s. The massive work begins with Napoleon's childhood, touches briefly on the Revolution and the Terror that follows, and then ends as Napoleon's Italian campaign is beginning. The big battle scenes are impressively staged, and were a significant influence of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. Though the film is not to all tastes, and suffers somewhat on video, it is a remarkable work.

Russian Sergei Bondarchuk works with the end of the Corsican's career in Waterloo. Like the Gance film, it is worth watching mostly for the battle scenes. They are some of the most historically accurate ever put on film. The same cannot be said of Rod Steiger's maniacal interpretation of Napoleon. It, however, is easily overlooked within the impressively staged cavalry and infantry charges. The proverbial cast of thousands (some of them members of the Red Army) has never been choreographed so well.

The French involvement in Vietnam is the subject of Pierre Schoendoerffer's grim 317th Platoon, the sadly prophetic story of a small group of Foreign Legionnaires trying to make a retreat after the battle of Dien Bien Phu. It's a rough black-and-white look at a nasty little war.

Gillo Pontecorvo takes a documentary approach to the French occupation of Algeria and resistance to it in The Battle of Algiers. Both films are implicitly critical of the government's actions, but neither can be reduced to propaganda. Without taking sides, they are about the human costs of guerrilla and terrorist campaigns.

And those films were not created out of nothing. The French tradition also goes back to Jean Renoir's 1937 Grand Illusion; Robert Bresson's fact-based POW drama A Man Escaped, from 1965; Schoendoerffer's second Vietnam film, Anderson Platoon; and Louis Malle's autobiographical Au Revoir les Enfants. All are discussed in different sections. Seen together, they reveal just how significant the French contribution to the genre has been.