Rent A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)

Lost Masterpiece - A Time to Love and a Time to Die review by MCG

This is an extraordinary film, probably Sirk's best film, and that is saying something. A wonderfully simple love story set among the ruins of Germany late in the war. Superbly directed, and the photography and cinemascope composition are exceptionally accomplished. Highly recommended.

We'll Always Have Hamburg - A Time to Love and a Time to Die review by CH

A success in its time, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (`1958) appears to have fallen from general awareness. Certainly it does not resonate as widely as All Quiet on the Western front. That too was taken from a novel by Remarque, who, narrowly avoiding a return to Great War battle, found that by the late-Twenties he was adept at depicting people in wartime (fittingly, that bestseller was filmed by a director named Milestone).

A Time to Live and a Time to Die too was made soon after Remarque's novel appeared. His novels were a hot ticket in their time and remain in print. This was to be the film with which Douglas Sirk returned to a Germany which he had fled in the Thirties and, after a diverse array of Hollywood films (including an unexpected take on Chekhov), became known for the brilliantly lit series of domestic small-town melodramas such as Imitation of Life.

Colours are naturally more muted in the ravaged terrain of wartime Hamburg to which John Gavin returns on leave from the Eastern front in a quest for his family. There he encounters the family doctor's pretty daughter Liselotte Pulver. Despite the strictures of her landlady (Agnes Windeck), love blossoms (symbolised somewhat awkwardly by a tree doing so early). She too wonders what has happened to her father who has been hauled to a concentration camp - something about which Gavin's schoolfriend David Thayer might have information, what with his rise in Nazi echelons bringing him a house in which even more antlers are hung upon the walls than there are women across the sofas.

All the while, upon the wide screen, bombs fall, buildings ignite and tumble in what were known as the Firestorm Raids - forcing out, ironically enough, those who sought refuge from Gestapo forces in hidden rooms (Remarque himself credibly plays a radical professor who offers sanctuary). Quandaries are compounded by pressure upon Gavin to return to the front. What will happen to him and his lover? Where has she gone? There are many tropes here familiar from romantic drama, and this is not the place to reveal more of what happens during a film which keeps one's attention for all of its 132 minutes. These do not fall back upon the easy option of relentless action. The novel is rooted in talk rough and smooth - and one soon learns almost to accept the American accents in which most of the cast speak.