THE GUNS OF AUGUST Movie Review
1964 Nathan Kroll
Nathan Kroll's adaptation of Barbara Tuchman's best-selling history is an adequate introduction to World War I, but that's all. It doesn't show the human, individual side of that horrible war. In fairness, it doesn't try to. Instead, the relatively brief running time is devoted to an explanation of the tangled roots of the war and an overview of the tactics of the fighting itself. Graphs, diagrams and unidentified generic combat footage tell most of the story.
The film begins with these words:
The Year 1914.
Millions of peaceful and industrious people were hounded into a war by the folly of a few all-powerful leaders. This war was in no way inevitable. But the results determined the shape of the world in which we live today.
"The innocence of the people was in the streets of Europe. The guilt was in the Cabinets.”
The scene then shifts to May 6, 1910 and the funeral of England's King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria. Nine European monarchs take part in the elaborate funeral procession. They're all related by blood or by marriage and they seem to share a fondness for gaudy military uniforms. Whenever they visit, they dress up in each other's finest regalia. Those operetta costumes also pretty much define the limits of their military experience. The film gamely tries to sort out the various allegiances and treaties that had resulted in a rough alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy against England, France, and Russia. (Remember that at the time, Austria-Hungary and Italy were barely countries as we define them, and Russia was still ruled by the Czar.)
They moved to the brink of war several times. When the French sent an expeditionary force to aid the Moroccan government against an insurrection, the Germans sent warships into the area and the English “concentrated the fleet.” The upshot was a German-British naval arms race in 1911–12, and everything finally came unraveled on June 28, 1914, when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, where Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were going after each other.
While a Socialist international congress was being held in Belgium and people were rising up everywhere in anti-war protests, the leaders lined up against each other and made demands. A little more than a month after the assassination, the continent was poised for a multi-faceted conflict. As the film puts it, “Fifty hours earlier, people all over Europe had held peace demonstrations. Now caught in the emotional frenzy of farewells, the same people found themselves jubilantly going off to war. Their governments, having consistently mismanaged the situation, no longer could see any alternative but to send thousands off to unknown battles.”
All the nations involved seem to have shared the naive but near-universal fantasy that the war would be over quickly and they would be victorious. It would take four years and 37 and a half million casualties to decide the issues inconclusively.
The film touches all of the important events and battles—the significance of submarines, trench warfare, the Marne, Verdun, the Russian Revolution—using grainy footage of big guns firing and infantry troops going over the top. In its depiction of the war itself, the film is definitely “history that's written by the winners.” It stresses the Prussian general Clausewitz's theories of doctrine of terrorism in conquered countries and finds the first hints of the Holocaust in the German destruction of the Belgian city of Louvain. The better fictional films of “The Great War” have much more to say about its effects on individual human beings.
Producer: Nathan Kroll. Running Time: 110 minutes. Format: VHS, LV.