The State of the Cinema World War I Revisited
Dworkin, Martin S.
The State of the Cinema World War I Revisited by MARTIN S. DWORKIN There is talk about new "anti-war" or "pacifist" tinges to the movies, as the screen continues its traditional concern with...
...The performances, which might be individually striking, often jar upon one another...
...Intermixed with these, of course, is the Hemingway revival itself, glittering on screen and in the gossip columns, ladies' magazines, and men's pulpy playboy slicks—advertising the paste jewelry of sophistic definitions of virtue without philosophy, action without intellect, and style that is only fashion...
...Most significant is the clearer exposure of the hypocrisy of patriotism whose purest virtue is slaughter, especially of patriots—thereby revealing the garish horror that soldiers must only obey and die, and that to be alive after attack is testimony enough that one has not advanced far enough against the enemy...
...All the colored magnificence of the production, however, seems immediately and ultimately anachronistic— in striking contrast to the black-and-white fidelity of Paths of Glory...
...The anti-clerical or at least bitterly critical representation of the apparent acquiescence of the Church in what men do to one another has been understated...
...The spectrum of movie sentiments critical of war has rarely been so wide as now...
...The miraculously preserved footage of combat, life in the trenches, marching troops, statesmen, and earnestly patriotic civilians, as selected by Henry Salomon and Richard Hauser for the program, The Great War (1917-1918), over NBC can be intended as history, and be historically interpreted, and accepted critically with this or that comment about theme or emphasis...
...In the film, Hecht and director Charles Vidor, within the overpowering insistence of producer David O. Selznick, have dragged out the romance until the war is buried, despite some magnificent panoramas of troops in the Alps, in a sticky lather of condign suffering...
...And it is only in those sadly rare moments when sentient individuals are evoked—when the observing persons are not ecstatically obliterated, but awakened, that the screen is able to transcend its organic relationship to modern mass warfare, and become truly critical...
...And the particular war being dramatized always is one that has to be fought, whether or not "war" in general is hell and cruel and destructive...
...And it is only in distinctly defining the choices at particular moments in particular wars that the generalized "anti-war" elements of a film may be truly effective —albeit hard to take, or even to be recognized, by people used to having their pacifism so righteously unspecific that there is never need to make any choices at all...
...But our war films have usually been "antiwar"—in the sense that democrats, especially, must convince themselves that their violences on behalf of life and liberty aspire towards peace...
...The book is primarily and designedly a "romance," hardened by a spurious journalism in the guise of realism, of the adolescent glories and Sunday-sermon penalties of an illicit love affair...
...The worst war-mongering has in common with the most gentle, generalized pacifism an indeterminate abhorrence of "war" in the abstract...
...The omnipresent vermin and putrefaction, the endlessly indurative rituals of barrage, attack, patrol, and burial alive as the only way of living, inform every sentence...
...Victor Francen brings to -a bit of sardonic humor about surgery a skilfully amused intelligence, in one of several good scenes in the film...
...Cobb intended to dissect the very basis of command, of military discipline, at a moment when war has lost all meaning except an inhuman, mechanistic momentum that perpetuates itself...
...But this nostalgia is much more directly expressed as nostalgia than in Paths of Glory...
...The shock of Paths of Glory is just this precision of location—not only as its action occurs at one instant of a particular war, but as its temper is that of a particular spirit of pacifism after war...
...Watching wartime morale and indoctrination films being warily replayed on television can be deeply embarrassing—and not only because the unequivocal outrages of the Japanese and Nazi villains have been equivocated by time and the exigencies of peaceful commerce and cold-war real-politik...
...But perspective does not mean lack of involvement, which has to do not only with material, but with manner of presentation...
...Jennifer Jones suffers...
...For this reason, the incidents of the war, culminating in the celebrated sequence of the retreat from Caporetto, which in the screenplay of Ben Hecht exposes the sordid inhumanity of the military mind in panic more bitterly and effectively than does the novel, seem even more incidental than in the novel...
...More than what we see today in what we were asked to believe then, it is the way in which our belief was demanded that is painful...
...A rented field near Munich was transformed into a faithful replica of a position on the Western Front, that could have been anywhere between Switzerland and the North Sea, but bears a strong and likely resemblance to the salient at "Dead Man's Hill" near Douaumont before Verdun—a place of shattered, ashen earth to this day...
...But he does not resolve a generalized formality out of the separate acting styles of Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Ralph Meeker, Wayne Morris, Joseph Turkel, and Timothy Carey...
...Kubrick has not attempted to make movie Frenchmen of the actors...
...In this light, movies about World War I of the silent and early sound-film eras which are occasionally ar-chaeologized on television and in special showings can be far more tolerable—precisely because they are remote enough now to be seen without topical pressures towards acquiescence...
...The "war" of these polemics is typically as unspecified as the "peace" they pursue...
...But the movies are so quintessentially the medium for mass experience, that the greatest mass experience of all seems naturally to speak out in its terms...
...The State of the Cinema World War I Revisited by MARTIN S. DWORKIN There is talk about new "anti-war" or "pacifist" tinges to the movies, as the screen continues its traditional concern with battles...
...They neither gesture like stage hairdressers nor speak like vaudeville pitchmen for California wine—avoiding that Hollywood convention of representing foreigners who are supposed to be speaking their own language in a manner any red-blooded American is supposed to be able to recognize...
...The timing of the remake of A Farewell to Arms— as of the recent The Sun Also Rises— has its own precision, ticking a moment of a generation yearning to be "lost," to be disillusioned, to feel cheated of idealism—anything rather than to know the score, the way we do, without the dream or the power to make our counting count...
...To make A Farewell to Arms again today (Frank Borzage made it in 1932, with Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper) has much more to do with the revival of trivialities about booze and bullfights, flapper fashions, and expatriate kul-turkrankheit, than with a coherent pacifism...
...and it is plain that they got what they deserved—although that they should deserve such suffering shows, with Hemingway profundity, that life is hell, after all...
...This placement in a time, in the way of purpose and art that makes a particular moment permanently topical, may be what is crucially missed in A Farewell to Arms...
...And the added sequence at the close, of the French soldiers joining with a frightened German girl in a folk song whose words, only, they cannot understand, conveys a final, unifying irony...
...To bring it up at all, however, is not merely to indict a single war, but to portray an example (based upon actual fact) of the operation of military law carried logically to its absurd extreme, having lost contact even with the human purposes that lead to war...
...The sweep is historical, as well as topical, offerings on television and theater screens views of attitudes before, during, and after all the great wars of this century...
...The gritty, gray-black coloration of the film in George Krause's stark photography reinforces the sense of a war that is remembered in monochrome...
...Massive and magniloquent, A Farewell to Arms may be considered a lavish costume epic, evoking a topical fantasy of history, expressing a currently fashionable attraction to a nostalgically fashionable disillusion...
...In making this film, Kubrick—and Kirk Douglas, who invested his own funds as well as his labor—deliberately sought to place the dramatized polemic precisely in a time, when it becomes possible for it to have meaning for any time...
...But then, there always happens to be this special, stinking conflict, the reasons for which somehow have nothing to do with any kind of argument against "war...
...It is a particular war, considered at a particular moment of abhorrence of war...
...But what is said about religion and war, simply by portraying a priest who can do no more than try to comfort and prepare men who are to die like vermin, remains bitter enough...
...For disillusion to become modish is to display itself as yet another enchantment...
...And there is the most crystalline Hemingway heroine, whose femininity, as in the dreams of frustrated boys, is satisfyingly vague and yielding and lyrically worshipful...
...There is no true sense of a time and place other than the wide-screened now, no recreation of the particular with that precision that makes possible a vision of the universal...
...The book by Humphrey Cobb is one of the most uncompromisingly bitter of those novels that expressed the filth, the slaughter, the immediately obscene and ultimately purposeless degradation of the trench warfare of World War I. It belongs with Barbusse's Under Fire, Dos Pas-sos' Three Soldiers, Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa and Education before Verdun, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and C. S. Forester's The General...
...But it can mean that we are enabled to see the particular moment—the occasion for going to war or of being in war that has to be lived through, one way or another...
...To be far from a depicted event in time does not mean that we may not be made part of it...
...Rock Hudson suffers...
...There is one of the most characteristically ordinary Hemingway heroes, whose manliness is his lack of intellect...
...In combining characters so as to make the colonel the advocate for the men on trial, a sharper distinction is made of the kind of military command that takes responsibility for the lives of soldiers...
...In a way, the movies may be said to be deeply involved in war itself...
...To bring is up now is to evoke the decisive trauma of this century...
...Vittorio De Sica is made to comprise at least two characters of the novel— and adds so much more so richly, that the film does seem to be about people in the hell of war, too, when he is on screen...
...Here is another film dealing with World War I, made from another novel of that time after war that is so fashionable in retrospect today...
...Only one serious element of the novel may be said to have been alloyed...
...The screen play by director Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson cuts even more sharply than the novel in several ways...
...In the movie experience, distance may lend perspective, and enchantment may thereby even be reasoned out...
...Not that the warfare of masses against masses has become directly cinematic...
...The simultaneous appearance of films made in the hortatory heat of the early 1940s and the nostalgic warmth of the 1950s is interesting in this aspect...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
