After the centenary of the November 1918 Armistice, we pay our own tribute to the lost generation commemorated in Peter Jackson's documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
When the Great War broke out on 1 August 1914, few were convinced that moving pictures would have a major role to play in proceedings. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia detested cinema and even the British Board of Censors was taken aback when the government sought its views on the value of film propaganda. As restrictions were placed on press freedom during the early months of the conflict, the question was moot. But, even when these were relaxed, Earl Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, barred film cameras from the Western Front. Indeed, it was only when Downing Street recognised that the Allies were losing the fight for hearts and minds abroad that the first Official Kinematographers were sent to the trenches in the autumn of 1915.
Film in Wartime
This doesn't mean cinema was silent on the matter, of course. Ernest Batley filmed Guy Du Maurier's invasion peril play, An Englishman's Home, while a butler in the Prime Minister's household was exposed as a spy in Harold M. Shaw's England's Menace. More enemy agents were comically confounded in Fred and Joe Evans's Lieutenant Pimple and the Stolen Submarine (all 1914), while cartoonist Lancelot Speed mocked the foe in such animated 'lightning sketches' as The Bully Boy (1915) and Anson Dyer did likewise in John Bull's Animated Sketch Book (1916). Similarly, German studios produced a range of 'field grey' comedies and melodramas like Carl Wilhelm's Fräulein Leutnant and Oskar Messter's How Max Won the Iron Cross (1914).
Despite the launch of Les Annales de la Guerre and Topical Budget, the Allies lagged behind when it came to newsreels, as German and Austrian audiences were kept abreast of events from the outset by the Kriegs-Journal and Messter-Woche programmes. But the conviction that the chemicals used to produce and develop moving images would be better employed in the manufacture of munitions led to a shortage of film stock and a dramatic decrease in output. As a consequence, film industries across the continent went into decline and the Hollywood studios had to step in to make up the shortfall in imports and it has retained its status as the capital of world cinema ever since.
As they were keen to avoid upsetting the various immigrant populations resident in the United States, as well as the vociferous Isolationist lobby, the movie moguls opted to ignore the war in Europe. However, pacifist tracts like Thomas Ince's Civilisation and Herbert Brenon's War Brides (both 1916) were produced in the wake of Frenchman Alfred Machin's Maudite soit la guerre (1914). One American did succeed in making a potent picture about the war, however, as Charles Urban was commissioned by Charles Masterman of the Topical Committee for War Films to make Britain Prepared (1915), which included scenes in Kinemacolor in a bid to show his compatriots the moral rectitude of the Allied cause.
The success of this review of troop training and naval exercises convinced the top brass that cinema could be useful after all. But it was Geoffrey Malins who transformed the way British film-makers approached the war with The Somme (1916), an innovative and arrestingly authentic recreation of the bloodbath that had shocked the nation, which he followed with The King Visits His Armies in the Great Advance (1916), The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks and The Retreat of the Germans and the Battle of Arras (both 1917). French (The Revenge of the French at Verdun, 1916) and Italian (Battle from the Astico to the Piave, 1918) documentarists followed suit. But the German High Command was so impressed by the emotional potency of Malins's epic that it created Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) in December 1917 to make features that were as patriotic as documentaries like With Our Heroes on the Somme (1917), which were being produced by the Bild- und Filmamt (BUFA).
The concept of the film star was still quite new at the outbreak of the war. But Henny Porten's appearance to promote the sale of war bonds in Rudolf Biebrach's Hann, Hein und Henny led to British stars like George Robey doing likewise (albeit in cartoon form) in Simple Simon (both 1917). Matheson Lang did his bit to promote rationing in Eat Less Bread, as did the popular duo of Henry Edwards and Chrissie White in Against the Grain and The Secret, while Alma Taylor reminded everyone of the beastliness of the Boche in Cecil Hepworth's The Leopard's Spots (1918). By contrast, Charlie Chaplin came in for considerable stick for remaining in Hollywood for the duration, although he did advertise Liberty Bonds in The Bond, which was released in the same year as his sole comedy about the war, Shoulder Arms (1918), which can be found on The Chaplin Revue and shows him dreaming about capturing Kaiser Wilhelm and the Crown Prince.
America entered the war on 6 April 1917, with the attack on a liner by a German U-boat off the Irish coast in 1915 having done much to change public opinion. Animator Winsor McCay recalled the incident in The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), but many American film-makers struggled to hit the right tone with their earliest wartime outings, as both Cecil B. DeMille and DW Griffith respectively used the conflict as a backdrop for convoluted romances in The Little American (1918) and Hearts of the World (1922).
The British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had encouraged Griffith to make a film to boost morale and he had visited the Western Front in search of inspiration. He would display more outrage in his script for Chester Whitney's The Hun Within (1918), but the melodramatic tone recurred in Rupert Julian's The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin (1918), in which the director took the title role and was punished for his bellicosity by Belgian blacksmith Elmo Lincoln, who had been wounded while saving his daughter from rapacious German soldiers, and Marshal Neilan's The Unpardonable Sin (1919), which saw Blanche Sweet take a dual role as American sisters trapped in Belgium in 1914 and assaulted by the rampaging troops. Audiences were also treated to escapist efforts like F. Richard Jones's Yankee Doodle in Berlin, a Mack Sennett-produced caper that sent American aviator Bothwell Browne behind enemy lines in drag to steal a vital map, while Henry B. Walthall was dispatched on a similar mission as Michael Lanyard (aka The Lone Wolf) in Irvin Willat's The False Faces (both 1919), which co-starred Lon Chaney as a crack German agent.
There were more factual films, such as William Nigh's biopic of US Ambassador James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, and the documentary, Crashing Through to Berlin (both 1918), which anticipated Frank Capra's Why We Fight series (1942-45) in explaining to American audiences what was at stake in the conflict. However, this felt more detached than British compilation pictures like Our Empire's Fight for Freedom (1918) and The World's Greatest Story, and the Belgian À la gloire du troupier Belge (both 1919). Indeed, few American war films matched the gravitas of Maurice Elvey's The Life Story of David Lloyd George (1918) or the anguish of such postwar reflections as Charles Tutelier's La Belgique martyre and Abel Gance's J'accuse (both 1919), which included a famous sequence of the dead rising from their graves to question whether their sacrifice had been worthwhile.
The War to End All Wars
The Great War had been a tragedy that had shaken the established order. In all, 9.7 million military personnel and 10 million civilians had perished and few were in the mood to glorify this grotesque waste of life. As the superb BBC series Fall of Eagles (1974) recalls, three of the autocratic monarchies that had dominated continental affairs for centuries had been toppled and, yet, film-makers in the 1920s refrained from criticising the politicians and generals who had been responsible for slaughter on an industrial scale.
Between 1914-18, films had focused on fighting for a noble cause and this patriotic tone pertained in the rare European postwar features on the conflict. Among the leading purveyors of such 'now it can be told' accounts was British Instructional Films, which sponsored H. Bruce Woolfe's The Battle of Jutland (1921) and Walter Summers's The Battle of Ypres (1925) and The Battles of Coronel and the Falkland Islands (1927). Many of the same personnel worked on MA Wetherell's The Somme (1927) and similar reconstructions were produced in Europe, including Louis Ralph's Unsere Emden (1926) and Léon Poirier's Verdun, visions d'histoire (1927), while American war correspondent Lowell Thomas made himself a key part of the story in With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia (1919).
As the American memory of the war was comparatively not as raw, Hollywood was less squeamish about broaching it. In 1921, June Mathis adapted Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's bestselling pacifist novel, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for director Rex Ingram, who made a star of Rudolph Valentino in the role of the tango-dancing Argentinian artist who fights at the Battle of the Marne. Vincente Minnelli remade the film in 1962, while the Marne setting enabled King Vidor to take a starker approach in The Big Parade (1925), as John Gilbert is swept up by patriotic fervour, only to return home as a disillusioned amputee. Directed with a sombre sense of spectacle, this uncompromising adaptation of Harry Behn's autobiographical novel, Plumes, reaffirmed the idea of the 'Lost Generation' and remained MGM's biggest commercial success until Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939).
By contrast, Raoul Walsh took a broadly comedic tack in his take on Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings's hit play, What Price Glory? (1926). Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe were lauded for their performances as Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, whose long-standing rivalry intensifies after they arrive in France and both fall for innkeeper's daughter, Dolores del Río. Walsh reunited the leads in The Cock-Eyed World (1929) and Women of All Nations (1931) before John G. Blystone directed them in Hot Pepper (1933). However, the sequels were not set during the war, although John Ford returned to the trenches in casting James Cagney and Dan Dailey alongside Corinne Calvet in What Price Glory (1952), which had originally been planned as a musical.
Clara Bow formed part of another romantic triangle with Richard Arlen and Charles 'Buddy' Rogers in Wings (1927), which was directed by William A. Wellman, who had seen action as a combat pilot in France. Notable for its epic recreation of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, which made daring use of planes borrowed from the US Army Air Corps, this rousing adventure won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Picture and Wellman reunited with Gary Cooper in The Legion of the Condemned (1928), which paid tribute to the exploits of the Lafayette Escadrille. Coop played another flyboy in George Fitzmaurice's Lilac Time (1928) and John Garrick performed more aerial heroics in John G. Blystone's The Sky Hawk (1929).
Adrian Brunel put an unusual spin on the war in Blighty (1927), as chauffeur Jameson Thomas finds love with the daughter (Lillian Hall-Davis) of his aristocratic boss after seeing action in the trenches alongside his son. Class was also a major theme in Sinclair Hill's Guns of Loos (1928), as blinded factory owner Henry Victor returns from the front to prevent a strike. Lloyd George reportedly told Hill that the film would have been worth a division if it had been available in 1916.
One of the first features produced in Canada, Bruce Bairnsfather's Carry On, Sergeant!, followed four friends to France, while John Ford's Four Sons (both 1928) took the more unusual step of chronicling the experiences of Bavarian siblings in the German and American armies. Ford would later direct The Lost Patrol (1934), a sound remake of Walter Summers's 1929 adaptation of a Philip McDonald novel about a patrol getting lost in the Mesopotamian desert. Cyril McLaglen had played the sergeant assuming command after his superior is shot by a sniper and his older brother, Victor, took the role in Ford's version, which featured a harrowing performance by Boris Karloff as a religious fanatic who loses his mind as supplies start to run low. Another popular wartime silent to be remade as a talkie was Herbert Wilcox's Dawn (1928), which resurfaced as war clouds gathered over Europe as Nurse Edith Cavell (1939), with Anna Neagle succeeding Dame Sybil Thorndike as the matron of a Brussels hospital who is court-martialled by the Germans for treating the wounded of all nationalities.
The Sound of Combat
Sound has a seismic impact upon cinema and made it easier to express the complex emotions emanating from the Great War. The first director to take advantage of dialogue to consider the themes of patriotism, glory and sacrifice was Lewis Milestone, the Russian-born émigré who had made training films with the US Signal Corps during the war. In adapting, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Milestone was able to explore the psychology of the young German recruits faced with the horror of the trenches and the film became the first to win the Oscar for both Best Picture and Best Director. Delbert Mann respectfully remade the story in 1979, but James Whale was frustrated by his take on Remarque's follow-up novel, The Road Back (1937), which was nowhere near as well received as his 1930 version of RC Sherriff's acclaimed play, Journey's End.
Whale had become interested in drama as a POW after being captured in 1917. He brought a first-hand insight to the material, which Sherriff had based on his own experiences at Vimy Ridge, Loos and Passchendaele, where he had been seriously wounded. Saul Dibb's 2017 remake of Journey's End reflects the ensuing century's shifts in attitude towards the Great War. But, for all its sincerity, it lacks the immediacy of Whale's deeply personal interpretation.
A veteran of the US Army Air Service, Howard Hawks provided an insider's insight into life in the Royal Flying Corps in The Dawn Patrol (1930), which starred Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Neil Hamilton in roles that would be taken by Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone in Edmund Goulding's 1938 remake. Although he had been too young to fight, Howard Hughes shared Hawks's fascination with flight and paid his own tribute to the RFC in Hell's Angels (1930), which pits a trio of Oxford pals on opposite sides when war breaks out. With dialogue sequences directed by an uncredited James Whale, this picture had a profound influence on Martin Scorsese's Hughes biopic, The Aviator (2004).
Ernest Hemingway's experiences as an ambulance driver informed A Farewell to Arms, in which an American volunteer enlists in the Italian army in the winter of 1917 and falls for the British nurse who cares for him after he is wounded. Charles Lang won the Oscar for the monochrome photography in Frank Borzage's 1932 version, with Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, while Vittorio De Sica received a Best Supporting Actor nomination as Major Rinaldi opposite Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones's in Charles Vidor's colour remake. Both films are available from Cinema Paradiso, as is In Love and War (1996), in which Richard Attenborough recalled the 19-year-old Hemingway's romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse who would inspire his novel.
Also available to rent is the espionage trio of George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari (1931), Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936) and Michael Powell's The Spy in Black (1939). Dutch exotic dancer Margaretha Zelle was played by Magda Sonja in Friedrich Feher's Mata Hari: The Red Dancer (1927), Jeanne Moreau in Jean-Louis Richard's Mata Hari, Agent 21 (1964) and by Sylvia Kristel in Curtis Harrington's Mata Hari (1985). But none came close to capturing the sense of mystery conveyed by Greta Garbo in one of her least appreciated roles. The deceptions of another femme fatale, Elsbeth Schragmüller, have also been filmed several times in various retellings, with Myrna Loy headlining Sam Wood's Stamboul Quest (1934), Dita Parlo taking the title role in GW Pabst's French and Edmond Gréville's English-language versions of Mademoiselle Docteur (1937) and Suzy Kendall leading Kenneth More up the garden path in Alberto Lattuada's Fräulein Doktor (1969).
John Gielgud was somewhat miscast in Hitchcock's take on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories, but Madeleine Carroll and Peter Lorre provide splendid support as the twisting tale heads towards the Swiss Alps. But Conrad Veidt was entirely at home in the story of a U-boat captain contacting agent Valerie Hobson, who is posing as a teacher in the Orkney Islands. Powell would return to the Great War with Emeric Pressburger in the middle section of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), which was inspired by a comic-strip by David Low. By the 1930s, a handful of films had started using humour to revisit the conflict, with Buster Keaton's wealthy idler accidentally winding up in uniform in Edward Sedgwick's Doughboys (1930), while Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy twice found their way to the front, in George Marshall's Pack Up Your Troubles (1932) and John G. Blystone's Block-Heads (1938), which sees Stan miss the Armistice and remain at his post for another 20 years until he shoots down a civilian plane.
Renewed Hostilities
After Britain declared war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, the Great War ceased to be of concern to European film-makers dedicated to providing potent propaganda and effective escapism. With the United States once more opting for neutrality at the start of the Second World War, Hollywood again found itself having to tread carefully in order to avoid offending either the Allies or the Axis. However, several pictures used the 1914-18 conflict to comment on the ongoing conflagration.
Following the example of Richard Boleslawski's Storm At Daybreak (1933), Robert Florey's Hotel Imperial (1939) used Mitteleuropean romance and intrigue to extend sympathy without taking sides. Charlie Chaplin was more outspoken in playing both a Jewish veteran of the trenches and Tomainian tyrant Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1940). But other directors used factual stories set during the Great War to show their solidarity, with William Keighley signing up James Cagney, George Brent and Pat O'Brien to a daredevil New York regiment in The Fighting 69th (1940), Howard Hawks and Michael Curtiz respectively guiding Gary Cooper and James Cagney to Best Actor Oscars in the biopics, Sergeant York (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), and Henry King helping Alexander Knox to a nomination in the same category in Wilson (1944), which explored how President Woodrow Wilson had tried to commit American forces to the Great War and ensure through the League of Nations that such a conflict could never happen again.
Shifting Perspectives
Such was the postwar preoccupation with the crushing of Fascism and the perceived threat posed by Communism that the First World War became a distant memory in Hollywood. Elia Kazan recalled life on the Home Front in his adaptation of John Steinback's East of Eden (1955), which earned James Dean an Oscar nomination and a Best Supporting statuette for Jo Van Fleet. Humphrey Bogart also struck gold with his performance as river trader Charlie Allnutt taking on the Imperial German Navy with the nominated Katharine Hepburn as missionary Rose Sayer in John Huston's The African Queen (1951). This was one of a clutch of features set on the continent over the next few years, among them Lesley Selander's The Royal African Rifles (1953) and Peter R. Hunt's Shout At the Devil (1976), while David Lean chronicled TE Lawrence's guerrilla war against the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which converted seven of its 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director.
Despite being epic in scale, this hugely influential biopic also explored notions of heroism and allegiance with a scepticism that reflected the tone evident in such revisionist depictions of the Great War as Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) and Joseph Losey's King & Country (1964). Both directed by Americans who had relocated to Britain in the wake of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's investigation into Communism in Hollywood, these compelling courtroom dramas respectively centred on the efforts of Kirk Douglas and Dirk Bogarde to defend a group of French soldiers who refuse to go on a suicide mission and a British tommy (Tom Courtenay) whose unintentional desertion is the result of shell shock rather than cowardice.
Deference was also in short supply in Richard Attenborough's all-star adaptation of Joan Littlewood's satirical musical, Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), and Julie Andrews hit all the right notes en route to a Golden Globe nomination as a German spy entertaining Allied troops in Paris in Blake Edwards's Darling Lili (1970). Jeremy Kemp played the German uncle who leads the half-English Andrews off the straight and narrow and he returns as the pilot who takes George Peppard's rookie under his wing in John Guillermin's take on Jack D. Hunter's novel, The Blue Max (1966). There was more aerial action, as Michael York pondered his divided loyalties in Etienne Périer's Zeppelin and John Philip Law and Don Stroud faced off as Red Baron Manfred von Richthofen and his Canadian nemesis Roy Brown in Roger Corman's Von Richthofen and Brown (both 1971).
Casting Matthias Schweighöfer and Joseph Fiennes in The Red Baron (2008), Nikolai Müllerschön put a fresh interpretation on their rivalry by showing how the Kaiser had sought to exploit the heroics of the Imperial German Air Service. More intriguingly, however, screenwriter Howard Barker repurposes Journey's End as a Royal Flying Corps story in Jack Gold's Aces High (1976) and some of the flight footage was later recycled for an episode of the classic Richard Curtis and Ben Elton sitcom, Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), which remains among the sharpest and most poignant lampoon of the Great War. Poking fun at this sensitive subject might have seemed risky, but the BBC provoked a far greater controversy with The Monocled Mutineer (1986), a four-part account by writer Alan Bleasdale of the escapades of imposter Percy Toplis (Paul McGann) at the Étaples training camp in September 1917.
The Great War in the Blockbuster Era
It's only comparatively recently that mainstream Hollywood has returned to the Great War movie. In the interim, the countries who had held Dominion status during the age of empire started to tell their own stories, with the betrayal of the ANZAC forces facing the Ottoman Turks being in examined in Ken Hannam's Break of Day (1976) and Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981), while the actions of the Australian cavalry in 1917's Battle of Beersheba were recalled in Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen (1987). More recently, Jeremy Sims drew attention to the labours of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company at Ypres in Beneath Hill 60 (2010), Johan Earl and Adrian Powers watched over three British soldiers stranded in No Man's Land in Forbidden Ground (2013), and Russell Crowe starred in and made his directorial debut with The Water Diviner (2014), which followed a farmer's search for the three sons who had failed to return from the Gallipoli campaign in which co-writer Andrew Knight's grandfather had served.
This mismanaged episode is further examined in two Australian mini-series, Ken Cameron and Ian Watson's ANZAC Girls (2014) and Michael Rymer's Deadline Gallipoli (2015). New Zealander Dale G. Bradley followed the fortunes of the Wellington Regiment at the same battle in Chunuk Bair (1992), while the indignities faced by the country's conscientious objectors are revealed in Peter Burger's Field Punishment No.1 (2014). The exploits of Canadian soldiers were commemorated in Robin Phillips's The Wars (1983), John Kent Harrison's A Bear Named Winnie (2004), Michael McGuire's 21 Brothers (2011) and Paul Gross's Passchendaele (2008), which joins two siblings fighting with the Winnipeg Rifles at the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, which is regarded as one of the bloodiest encounters of the entire war.
The shepherd poet Ellis Evans was killed on the first day of this pitiless encounter and Paul Turner marks his achievement in Hedd Wyn (1992), which became the first Welsh-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award. Yet, while the conflict inspired a wealth of great art and literature, the famous war poets have been surprisingly neglected by film-makers. The writings of Wilfred Owen can be heard alongside Benjamin Britten's music in Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989), while Stuart Bunce plays Owen receiving encouragement from James Wilby's Siegfried Sassoon in Gillies MacKinnon's 1997 adaptation of Pat Barker's acclaimed novel, Regeneration.
Based on Sassoon's therapy sessions with Dr William Rivers (Jonathan Pryce), this thoughtful film is only bettered in its assessment of the medical treatment given to casualties by Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971), which centres on the memories and imaginings of an American soldier (Timothy Bottoms) who is left barely alive after treading on a landmine on the last day of the war. Nursing is also the theme of James Kent's handsome adaptation of Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth (2014), which saw Hayley Atwell assume the role taken with such distinction by Cheryl Campbell in Moira Armstrong's multiple BAFTA-winning BBC mini-series.
There's more BBC biography on offer in Brian Kirk's My Boy Jack (2007), in which champion of empire Rudyard Kipling (David Haig) risks the ire of his wife, Caroline (Kim Cattrall), in securing a commission in the Irish Guards for his shortsighted son (Daniel Radcliffe), and Philip Martin's Einstein and Eddington (2008), which recalls the secret wartime correspondence between German physicist Albert Einstein (Andy Serkis) and British astronomer and conscientious objector Arthur Eddington (David Tennant). Martin also directed Abi Morgan's two-part adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's bestseller, Birdsong (2012), which flashes back from Royal Engineer Eddie Redmayne tunnelling at the Somme with working-class pal Joseph Mawle and thinking back to his adulterous affair with married Frenchwoman, Clémence Poésy. The BBC was also behind Ian Hislop and Nick Newman's drama, The Wipers Times (2013), which follows how Sherwood Foresters Captain Fred Roberts (Ben Chaplin) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (Julian Rhind-Tutt) find a printing press and begin publishing a magazine for their mates on the Ypres Salient.
Although the tone might have changed, certain themes continue to recur in British films about the Great War, with brothers falling for the same girl in the Yorkshire of David Green's 1914 All Out (1987) and the Devon of Pat O'Connor's Private Peaceful (2012). The latter was adapted from a novel by Michael Morpurgo, whose 1982 children's book, War Horse, inspired both a 2007 Tony-winning play by Nick Stafford and Steven Spielberg's 2011 feature, which was nominated for six Oscars. Hero Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) sees action at the Second Battle of the Somme in 1918, but the focus is firmly the 48 hours before the troops went over the top on 1 July 1916 in William Boyd's The Trench (1999), as sergeant Daniel Craig and lieutenant Julian Rhind-Tutt prepare their young conscripts for action.
The horror of warfare is taken more literally in Michael J. Bassett's Deathwatch (2002), as Torben Liebrecht proves more than a match for the tommies taking refuge in a German trench after getting lost behind enemy lines during a night raid. However, while the war is reduced to a passing detail in Edward Zwick's Legends of the Fall (1994) and Robert Redford's The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), it's very much at the heart of Robert Clem's Company K (2004), an uncompromising adaptation of William March's novel about a veteran who is haunted by the memory of the German soldier he killed while he works on an account of his Marine unit's exploits on the Western Front.
The heroism is of a more fanciful kind in John Hough's Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986), an effects-laden take on the beloved novel series by Captain WE Johns that casts a Manhattan caterer (Alex Hyde-White) back in time to help fighter ace James Bigglesworth (Neil Dickson) capture a fiendish secret weapon. James Franco and Jean Reno also took to the skies in Tony Bill's Flyboys (2006), which lauds the deeds of the American volunteers who flew with the 124th squadron of the Aéronautique Militaire, which was better known as the Lafayette Escadrille.
By contrast, Brian Trenchard-Smith ventured on to the high seas for Britannic (2000), in which Amanda Ryan plays a spying governess aboard the Titanic's sister vessel, as it's refitted as a hospital ship to tend to the wounded from Gallipoli. And, of course, the Ottoman Empire is the source of the mustard gas that so appals the immortal Amazon warrior goddess, Diana (Gal Godot), in Patty Jenkins's DC Comics spin-off, Wonder Woman (2017), which sparked lively debates about its snubbing by the Oscar academy and its validity as an affirmation of female empowerment.
The View From the Continent
The combination of the Great War and the advent of talking pictures proved almost ruinous for European cinema as a global force. Several pre-eminent companies, including Pathé and Gaumont, struggled to recapture past glories in the face of Hollywood competition and only UFA, with its state-of-the-art facility at Neubabelsberg, could match studios like MGM and Paramount in terms of technical sophistication and output.
Having bitten back at the victorious Allies by commissioning a more Teutonocentric account of the conflict in Leo Lasko's two-part documentary, Der Weltkrieg (1927), UFA restricted itself to such melodramatic studies of heroism as Gustav Uckiky's Morgenrot (1933), which culminated in a crew's attempt to escape from a beleaguered U-boat. Indeed, the most notable Weimar reflections on the conflict followed the lead of Westfront 1918 (1930), GW Pabst's pacifist tract for Nero-Film, which centred on the common humanity of some French and German combatants. But, while Victor Trivas's Niemandsland and Karl Hartl and Luis Trenker's Berge in Flammen (both 1931) celebrated brotherhood, Heinz Paul's Tannenberg and Louis Ralph's Kreuzer Emden (both 1932) were more conventionally patriotic.
As its landscape had been scarred by the Western Front that had stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border, France had little appetite for war films. A notable exception was Raymond Bérnard's Wooden Crosses (1932), which was adapted from an autobiographical novel by Roland Dorgelès, who insisted that principals like Charles Vanel (who was twice wounded) and Pierre Blanchar (who was gassed at Verdun) had genuine combat experience. Producer Bernard Natan was determined to make audiences despise warfare and urged Bérnard to shoot at night to create a nightmarish aura. During filming on the desolate battlefields of Champagne, unexploded ordnance frequently turned up unclaimed corpses and, when the picture received its television premiere in 1962, one veteran was so disturbed by the authenticity of the action that he committed suicide.
The class aspect of Bérnard's undervalued feature recurred in Jean Renoir's masterly POW picture, La Grande illusion (1937), as working-class lieutenant Jean Gabin finds himself incarcerated in the mountain fortress of Wintersborn along with a nouveau riche Jew (Marcel Dalio), and an aristocratic captain (Pierre Fresnay), who has more in common with the Prussian junker in command (Erich von Stroheim) than he does with the majority of his own men. Orson Welles famously claimed that this would be his choice if he could only save one film on an ark and it remains one of cinema's most trenchant explorations of the futility of war. But, while its fame endures, pictures produced in Fascist Italy, including Roberto Omegna's Gloria: La grande guerra (1934), Marco Elter's Le scarpe al sole (1935) and Giovacchino Forzano's Tredici uomini e un cannone (1939), have been largely forgotten.
Austrian Michael Haneke used events in a quiet German village to chronicle the months leading up to the Hapsburg ultimatum in The White Ribbon (2009), which was not only nominated for two Oscars, but which also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A few films have been released in the recent past to examine the global aspects of the conflict, including Masanobu Deme's The Ode to Joy (2006), about German POWs in Japan, and Ernst Gossner's 1915: The Battle for the Alps (aka The Silent Mountain, 2014), about the efforts of Austrian soldier William Moseley to cross the Dolomites to be reunited with his Italian sister-in-law, Eugenia Constanti.
As the Armenian Genocide, the Easter Rising in Ireland and the Russian Revolution are major topics in themselves, we shall merely mention a selection of related titles available from Cinema Paradiso, including Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002), Fatih Akin's The Cut (2015) and Terry George's The Promise (2016), Ken Loach's Cannes-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Aku Louhimies's Rebellion and Pat Collins and Ruan Magan's documentary 1916: The Irish Rebellion (both 2016), and Esfir Shub's The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Vsevolod Pudovkin's The End of St Petersburg (both 1927) and Sergei Eisenstein's October (1928).
As the First World War was viewed as a national disaster, Soviet films on the theme were few and far between, with Alexander Muratov's Moonzund (1987) being released to mark the 70th anniversary of the Russo-German naval encounter known as the Battle of Moon Sound. However, film-makers in the Putin era have also been reluctant to examine Russian military failures, with the result that biopics like The Admiral (2008), Andrey Kravchuk's profile of Alexander Kolchak, and Battalion (2015), Dmitri Meshkiev's tribute to the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, have been rarities.
A more unusual offering is Spanish animator Miguel Puyol's The Aviators (2008), which recalled the epic flight of a carrier pigeon named Cher Ami, who overcame injury to deliver a message from the US 77th Division during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in October 1918. Russell Mulcahy provided a live-action account of this rearguard by mostly Irish, Polish, Italian and Jewish immigrant troops in The Lost Battalion (2001), while Scottish soldier Alan Bates finds himself in charge of the messenger pigeons near a town that has been booby-trapped by German forces in Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966). In a bid to avoid capture, however, Bates winds up among the inmates of an asylum in this surreal satire that remains a one-off among Great War pictures. However, Jean-Jacques Annaud also took a comic approach in depicting the feud between French and German trading posts in West Africa in Black and White in Color (1976), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Annaud also produced Sergei Bodrov's Running Free (1999), about an orphaned boy's friendship with a colt named Lucky in a war-torn settlement in German South-West Africa.
Contrasting this picture's cynicism is the sentimentality that Christian Carion readily embraces in Merry Christmas (2005), an Oscar-nominated drama that recreates the famous Christmas truce of 1914, which broke out when British and French troops applauded the singing of a German tenor (Benno Fürmann) and his Danish soprano wife (Diane Kruger). Adapted from a bestselling novel by Sébastien Japrisot, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement (2004) also earned Academy Award nominations, while Marion Cotillard won the César for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the Corsican prostitute encountered by Audrey Tautou in her search for the fiancé she refuses to believe lost his life on the Western Front.
Post-war grief is also to the fore in François Ozon's Frantz (2016), as Paula Beer becomes intrigued by Pierre Niney, the Frenchman who comes to a small German town to pay his respects at the grave of her fiancé. And the role of women in wartime was further explored by Xavier Beauvois in The Guardians (2017), which earned Iris Bry a César nomination for Best Newcomer, as the orphan who comes to help Nathalie Baye and daughter Laura Smet run their farm in the Limousin after their menfolk leave for the trenches.
Getting the Facts Straight
Dozens of documentaries marking the centenary of the 1914-18 conflict have been released on disc over the last five years. Cinema Paradiso users can access many of them by typing 'Great War' or 'First World War' in the search line. However, a number of titles stand out, among them Nathan Kroll's feature account of the causes of the war, The Guns of August (1964), which should be viewed alongside Justin Hardy's excellent BBC series, 37 Days (2014), which reveals how Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (Ian McDiarmid) sought to use diplomacy to prevent hostilities following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.
Of the various overviews available to rent, the most essential is the BBC's 26-part series, The Great War (1964), which was narrated by Michael Redgrave and formed the template for ITV's The World At War (1973-74). However, based on a scholarly tome by Huw Strachan, The First World War (2003) also makes a fine introduction, while those seeking further historical insight should try the David Reynolds duo of Armistice: The End Game of World War One and Long Shadow (both 2014), which considers how the conflict continued to impact upon global society after the guns fell silent.
Also worth exploring are six titles from 2014: Voices of the First World War, Railways of the Great War, Great War Diaries, The Great War in Colour, The Great War Poets and Flashback: The First World War. Drawing on the archives of the Imperial War Museum, the latter presents events in two-minute segments that will help viewers of all ages gain a better understanding of what was at stake a century ago.
If you're interested in more films on the subject, be sure to check out the Military and War Dramas section where you'll find plenty of great titles!
