WORLD WAR I Movie Review

World War on Screen I

“Waiting! Order! Mud! Blood! Stinking stiffs! What the hell do we get out of this war anyway! Cheers when we left and when we get back! But who the hell cares … after this?” Jim Apperson (John Gilbert) The Big Parade (1925)

The movies as we know them—the system of studios and stars—were born in the aftermath of the Great War. The first depictions of it on screen were created by men who had experienced it, and those films were meant for an audience that still held clear memories of the subject.

The first big commercial hit to deal with the war is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Though the film is primarily a vehicle for star Rudolph Valentino, director Rex Ingram had served with the Canadian Royal Flying Corps. He handles the combat scenes with a strong sense of realism that is somewhat at odds with the rest of the ambitious, sprawling story. In The Big Parade, made four years later, King Vidor uses the experiences of three young Americans in the trenches as the basis for a strong anti-war statement. William Wellman's Wings, the first Academy Award winner, made in 1927, presents the air war as a more adventurous enterprise, but when he turns the cameras to the struggle on the ground, he stresses sheer scope of the destruction in cratered landscapes.

Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front is the most famous film to come out of the war. It's an unequivocal condemnation that has influenced virtually every realistic war film that has been made since. It was also a commercial and critical hit, but producers realized that more money is to be made in glorifying the adventure of war than in revealing the horror. Millionaire Howard Hughes certainly understood that when he made Hell's Angels. He began the project as a silent film, then reworked it for sound. The basis of the picture's appeal, though, lies in its combination of spectacular aerial combat footage and an equally spectacular Jean Harlow, usually wearing as little as possible. Variations on that formula have been repeated countless times over the decades.

Just as influential in its own way is The Lost Patrol, one of John Ford's first sound films. It tells an elementally simple story of soldiers who are stuck in the desert without an officer and must struggle against a largely unseen enemy. Again, with only a few variations, the plot would be adapted to fit different circumstances and different wars.

Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion combines ideas about war, society, and class in a prisoner of war setting. Virtually all of the conventional action scenes are absent. Instead, Renoir uses the genre to more intellectual ends. That is precisely not the case with Dawn Patrol. In the 1938 film, a remake of the 1930 original unavailable on video, Errol Flynn and David Niven are at their youthful best. So is Basil Rathbone as their commanding officer, but the airplanes are the real stars.

By 1940, when The Fighting 69th was produced, America was getting ready for another war, and the story of the “Rainbow Division” is high-flown propaganda. It unsubtly stresses the need for men to submerge their individuality within a group to work for a higher purpose, indeed a holy purpose. A year later, Howard Hawks's Sergeant York would do the same, though with a much more heroic tone. On the eve of World War II, nobody wanted to think about the horrific realities of World War I.

It wasn't until 1957, in the brief lull between Korea and Vietnam, that a filmmaker would look back at the “War to End All Wars.” Stanley Kubrick's angry Paths of Glory can be seen as an anti-unit picture, one that shows what happens when leaders, and the military organization itself, fail the men who serve. It's a grim story, superbly acted by producer-star Kirk Douglas, and marred only by a weak ending.

David Lean is more respectful, but not uncritical, in Lawrence of Arabia, by far the best of the ‘60s epic war films. John Guillerman's The Blue Max returns to Hughes's proven formula with some of the best color aerial sequences ever filmed, and an often-undressed Ursula Andress.

In the 1980s, the Aussies were finally heard from, with two fine films detailing their contribution. Peter Wier's Gallipoli could almost be a companion piece to All Quiet on the Western Front, as it follows a group of young men who approach battle with varying degrees of enthusiasm and understanding of what they're doing. Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen works with more conventional heroics, and features superb equestrian action scenes.

Finally, Nathan Kroll's adaptation of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is a fair introduction to the whole subject of World War I. If it misses the emotional, human costs of the war, it does do a good job of sorting out the complex causes of the war, presenting the tactics, and counting the dead.