Soviet cinema during Khrushchev

Joseph Stalin was dictator during the handful of years in the 1920s when Soviet revolutionary cinema flourished but as he became convinced that what Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov and the others were doing was bourgeoisie and potentially counter-revolutionary he also put a stop to its flourishing. Instead, for close to three decades "socialist realism" was the only kind of cinema that was allowed, from which very little is considered of any value. ”[T]he basic criterion for evaluating the art qualities of a film is the requirement that it be presented in a form which can be understood by the millions” was the stated policy and as conflict was considered counter-revolutionary the films were devoid of that. An additional consequent of Stalin's film policy was that fewer and fewer films were made.

But after Stalin's death in 1953 things eased up. Not just for Soviet cinema but for the Soviet Union at large. The horrible years of Stalin's show trials, mass killings, famine and forced starvation (millions of people were killed often for no other reason than that their deaths pleased Stalin) was replaced with the, comparatively speaking, lighter touch of Nikita Khrushchev. Especially after Khrushchev's speech in 1956 denouncing the homicidal madness of Stalin's year. The so-called Thaw appeared, and Soviet cinema was given a chance to expand somewhat. It was still under strict rules, political control and censorship, but it was freer than under Stalin. The Thaw lasted roughly until 1964, when Khrushchev was disposed of and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev.

The most significant film of those years was also the film that signalled to the world that a new era had begun, The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov 1957), which won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1958. It was a film about the Second World War, as was almost all of the famous films from those years, including Ballad of a Soldier (Grigori Chukhrai 1959), Fate of a Man (Sergei Bondarchuk 1959), Ivan's Childhood (Andrei Tarkovsky 1962) and Father of a Soldier (Revaz Chkheidze 1964). They combine emotionally powerful stories with a poetic sensibility, visually, and are a far cry from the stiffness and stuffiness of Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938), the previous Soviet war film of note. Although, despite what Bordwell and Thompson refer to as "mammoth battle sequences" in their Film History: An Introduction, they contain very little actual warfare. They are more concerned with what happens away from the front.

Fate of a Man

The Cranes are Flying is about a happy young couple who are separated when he unexpected enlists and goes off to the front where he is killed. But focus is on her life at home, unwillingly marrying the cousin of her fiancé and living with her in-laws until she finally breaks free. Ballad of a Soldier is about a young radio operator who, after having almost by accident destroyed two German tanks, is given a leave to go home to see his mother. On his way home he meets a young girl and falls in love, as does she, but they have precious little time together. Fate of a Man, perhaps the best of them, is a story of a man's tragic story during the war and in a German prison camp until he adopts a little boy after the armistice. Ivan's Childhood is undoubtedly the most famous one today, because of Tarkovsky, and is about a young boy being used to spy on the Germans and his present situation is peppered with dreams and flashbacks to a happier time before the war. Father of a Soldier finally is about an old man searching for his son and always arriving too late. The son was wounded and hospitalised and that is where the father went first, but the son had been discharged and returned to his unite so the father eventually becomes a soldier at the frontline himself, killing Germans whilst looking for the son.

Ivan's Childhood

The films are rather similar in tone and feelings. While not exactly propaganda for the Communist government and the state they are about men who sign up and are killed with a firm belief in the righteousness of the cause and the wisdom of their leaders. There is none of the anger, cynicism or criticism of their American war films such as Attack! (Robert Aldrich 1956) or Hell is for Heroes (Don Siegel 1962). What there is though is a sadness and world-weariness. Where they differ most from one another is in the visual style. The Cranes are Flying, shot by Sergey Urusevskiy, has an impressionistic look and editing technique. It is somewhat reminiscent of Andrzej Wajda's Polish films of the 1950s and the coming French New Wave. Ballad of a Soldier, shot by Vladimir Nikolayev and Era Savelyeva, looks more like earlier work of Alexander Dovzhenko, with a touch of John Ford. Fate of a Man, shot by Vladimir Monakhov, is full of tricks, some of which are more successful than others, but is on the whole rather dynamic and visually exciting. Father of a Soldier, shot by Archil Pilipashvili and Lev Sukhov, has some extraordinary images but is the least distinguished. Ivan's Childhood, shot by Vadim Yusov, is more sombre and has shots that linger longer than in the other films. It is on every level a more calm and relaxed film whereas the others are more edgy and nervous. It is sometimes unclear whether their editing patterns and abrupt tonal shifts are deliberate or amateurish. All of them have rather ambitious goals in terms of style and capturing larger truths about humanity, but Tarkovsky here seems to be the one most at ease with the scope of the undertaking. The Cranes are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier and Father of a Soldier are filled with contrived situations and coincidences created primarily to make the audience cry, which is why I prefer Tarkovsky's and Bondarchuk's two films, which also happens to be the first features of either director. The characters in their films are also more complex. Ballad of a Soldier in particular has such immaculate main characters it borders on the ridiculous although the chaste love between two apple-cheeked teenagers is quite sweet. (Pauline Kael was not impressed by The Cranes are Flying or Ballad of a Soldier, calling them "good examples of nineteenth-century patriotism and nineteenth-century family values" when "authority was good, only people without principles thought about sex, and it was the highest honor to fight and die for your country." in her essay "Fantasies of the Art-House Audience".)

There were not only films about the Second World War that were being made of course. There were adaptations of Shakespeare and Cervantes. There was the musical comedy Carnival Night (1956). (It was produced by Mosfilm, which also produced The Cranes are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, Fate of a Man and Ivan's Childhood. Father of a Soldier was produced by Grusia Film and Qartuli Pilmi, it is a Georgian production.) The Rumyantsev Case (Iosif Kheifits 1956) was a crime story, Lesson of Life (Yuli Raizman 1955) was about a married couple and their everyday concerns, Amphibian Man (Vladimir Chebotaryov and Gennadi Kazansky 1962) was a science fiction story and the most successful domestic film in Soviet of 1962 (although less popular than The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges 1960)). Elem Klimov, who is today famous for the brutal war film Come and See (1985), began his career making satirical comedies, such as his first feature Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964). But that was towards the very end of the Thaw and things started to become ever more constricted and laborious. Two of the most unique filmmakers who just about managed to get started until the Thaw was over, Andrei Konchalovsky and Sergei Paradjanov, both saw several of their films cut, be censured or banned. But their careers are largely outside the scope of this article. Sergei Bondarchuk and Andrei Tarkovsky continued to do impressive work, including Bondarchuk's epic series based on Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace, but filmmaking would not be the same after 1965.

Filmmaking in a time and place of dictatorship is never easy, and making films that did not satisfy the Politburo or the commissariat was not possible in Soviet, not before, after or during the Thaw. Any film made in Soviet needs to be considered with that in mind. But even if there was plenty of restrictions and plenty of propaganda during the years of the Thaw too there was just a little less of it, and it was possible to create something both beautiful and meaningful.

The Cranes are Flying

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A link to my earlier article about Andrei Tarkovsky: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/2012/04/andrei-tarkovsky.html

A Bell for Adano (1945)

In my on-going series of articles about war films made in 1945 the first three films were of actual combat, Ford's They Were Expendable (in the Philippines), Walsh's Objective, Burma! and William Wellman's The Story of G.I. Joe (in Italy). This post is about a film set behind the front line, Henry King's adaptation of A Bell for Adano, originally a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by John Hersey. That way the post combines three of my major research focuses of late: war films from 1945, 20th Century Fox and Henry King.

Hersey was a war correspondence for the magazines Time and Life and in 1944 he was in Sicily where he visited the small town of Licata. After the Allied invasion of Italy the previous year the fascists mayors were removed from power and replaced by officers from Britain or the US. In Licata, an U.S. Army Major called F.E. Toscani was put in charge and one of his first tasks was to replace a 700 years old bell that the fascists had taken and melted down to make weapons. It was not Toscani's own priority to replace it but it was what the villagers wanted, not least as a symbol that the years of war and dictatorship were over. Later Hershey wrote a book about it, but a fictionalised version, renaming the town Adano and calling the major Joppolo instead of Toscani. (As indicated by the names both the real major and the fictional one were of Italian ancestry. The parents were born there and had come to the U.S. as economic refugees.)

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The film opens with a shot with the camera up in the town looking down at a car driving through the countryside. It continues up a hill, past the harbour and through the town until it stops on the main square. It is done in one excellently timed long take and immediately creates a strong sense of place. In the car are Joppolo, played by John Hodiak, and his sergeant, played by William Bendix, and while they seem to be the only people around, soon they will have their hands full with people coming at them from all directions, primarily asked for food and water. In the beginning the Americans, and in particular the captain in charge of the MPs, are rather contemptuous towards the Italians. But Joppolo, despite being overwhelmed by his assignment, does not succumb to such feelings. He remains committed to fairness and justice. This is what eventually leads to his downfall.

The cast is a combination of American, Italians, Italian-Americans and the French actor Marcel Dalio, also playing an Italian. The Czech-born Hugo Haas plays a priest. Henry Morgan plays the MP who is, in a way, the villain in the film. Gene Tierney plays Tina Tomasino, an Italian woman with whom Joppolo has some sort of a relationship although he is married and she is engaged. His wife is home in America and her boyfriend is missing, perhaps dead or in a prison camp, so they are united in their loneliness. It is a sweet section of the film but Tierney does not feel right. Tina wants to be different from the other women in town, and she dyed her hair to become a blonde to stand out from all the others with black hair, but there is something stiff about Tierney's performance. Many of the Italians are otherwise portrayed in a somewhat exaggerated manner, which gets tiresome on occasion.

Dalio between Hodiak and Bendix.

While not shot on location on Sicily but at Brent's Crag in California (the same place where a few years earlier Ford had made How Green Was My Valley (1941), also for 20th Century Fox) King and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle try to do what they can to create a feeling of realism. Unusually for a film by King the mise en scène looks somewhat haphazard and improvised, and the lighting is sometimes rather dull, but this might be deliberate in order to make it look less staged. There are also several very powerful sequences, such as one when the men of the town, who had been imprisoned by the Allied, one day returns home. First we see the women leaving their houses, sisters, wives and mothers, and then we see the men walking, tired but happy, towards them. Then there is a sudden cut from street-level to a camera placed high above the square where all the men and women meet in one big frenzy of tears and hugs. When seen from a distance all the combined emotions from all these people becomes very moving. The recurring use of the 1944 romantic song Lili Marleen also contributes to the feeling of the film.

A Bell for Adano is peculiar for the angle from which the story is told. This honourable man, Joppolo, is doing the best he can but he is hamstrung by the bureaucracy and pettiness of the U.S. Army. Considering the war was still going on when the film was shot it is remarkable how it sides with the Italians, ostensibly the enemy, against the army and the thinly disguised general Patton. I do not think there are any similar films set in Germany or Japan; that came later. But it does perhaps relate to one of King's recurrent themes, which is forgiveness and acceptance. (Here that the Italians and the Americans should aim for this together, and to move forward together.) This does not mean that the Italian fascists are forgotten. Many of the Italians in the film are shown to have supported the fascists, with different levels of sincerity, and the former major, an unrepentant fascist, is publicly humiliated before the townspeople. But the film's sympathy lies with the poor and hungry civilians. By siding with the townspeople and going against his own people Joppolo wins the locals' trust but at the same time it raises his superiors' suspicions and disappointment. The film ends with Joppolo being dismissed and relocated, at the very day the locals have thrown him a big party. His sergeant cannot bring himself to tell him the news and instead gets drunk and then collapse in tears, so Joppolo is able to enjoy the party without knowing it will be the last time he will ever see these people. The beautiful last shot shows Joppolo, in the early morning mist, get into a jeep and drive away through the empty streets.

The ending is typical for the war films of 1945, it is not triumphant but melancholic. While A Bell for Adano is not the best of them, or the best of Henry King, it is both interesting and moving.

Tierney and Hodiak.

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A Bell for Adano was edited by Barbara McLean, one of King's most important partners. They made close to 30 films together.

My earlier article about Henry King is here.

Here are the articles about They Were Expendable, Objective, Burma! and The Story of G.I. Joe.

After the book and film came out there was some friction between the real major, Toscani, his wife and John Hersey due to the part about the woman whom Toscani allegedly had an affair with.

Objective, Burma! (1945)

There were at least four major American war films released in 1945, two of which I have written about here before: The Story of G.I. Joe, directed by William Wellman, and John Ford's They Were Expendable (by far the best of them). Now the time has come to consider Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! (The fourth is A Walk in the Sun, directed by Lewis Milestone.)

It is about an Allied raid into Burma, occupied by the Japanese, to destroy a radar outpost and it is inspired by actual events, which had just taken place. The film also begins like a newsreel and occasionally newsreel footage appear throughout the film. As such it is in keeping with Walsh's journalistic impulses, which appear from time to time in his oeuvre.

But the film is of course not a completely accurate depiction of what happened. When it came out it was lambasted by the British who complained that it made it look as if the Americans won the war by themselves, with the role of the British ignored. Churchill himself was apparently outraged and the film was removed from cinemas after a week. However, this criticism is unfair because the film is not about the war at large; it is only about one small, specific mission, a commando raid. In addition, the briefing for the mission in the beginning is made by a British major, and two Gurkha soldiers and a Chinese soldier are part of the group, and they are more prominent than most of the G.I.s.

Another kind of criticism against the film has been about racism, and the depiction of the Japanese. But this criticism can also be countered. The Japanese are not depicted any differently from Nazi Germans in the war films set in Europe, and they are shown to be smart and sophisticated. But they are rarely seen at all, they are primarily shadows, striking without warning. There is one scene which is usually mentioned as example of the film's racism, and it is when one American character screams "Wipe them out, I say! Wipe them off the face of the earth." He does this after the soldiers have found some of their comrades killed after having been horribly tortured (something that did happen) and at such a time the reaction does not seem implausible. It is worth noticing that the person who says it is a tired old man, a journalist who is following the soldiers as a correspondent, and who is on the verge of a mental breakdown. His line is not cheered on by anyone, nobody seems to agree with him. And, right after the old man has said the line Walsh cuts to the face of an allied Chinese soldier, looking askance. So the film is more complex that the critics give it credit for.

The leader of the group, captain Nelson, is played by Errol Flynn (seen above) but it is a far cry from his usual heroics and good fun. Here he is subdued, already in the first scene, and he grows increasingly weary as the film progresses. He has every reason for doing so. While at first everything is going well and they easily succeed in their mission, destroying the radar facility deep in the jungle, getting back home is a lot harder. They were able to take the Japanese by surprise at first but once they have been found out the mission descends into horror. They starve, get sick, get bitten by bugs, get stabbed, get shot, get tortured and grow increasingly restless and desperate, and it is always unbearably hot and humid. When Nelson finally is back at headquarters a senior officer congratulates him on his successful mission, which to Nelson is something of a slap in the face. In his hand he holds the dog tags from all the men he has lost (the majority of those who participated in the raid) and he says "This is what it cost." 

Objective, Burma! is a Warner Bros. film, produced and co-scripted by Jerry Wald, from an original script by Alvah Bessie, but it is also one of Walsh's map movies (as Dave Kehr has called them), where a group of people have to travel from point A to B, with constant references to their maps, and where everything is focused on forward motion. The visual style is also very much Walsh's, with his impressive use of deep focus and deep space. There is always a lot of things going on in any particular shot, especially scenes at base camp in the beginning, with constant movement and action in the background of every shot. The cinematographer was James Wong Howe, one of the very best, although he and Walsh fought a lot on set, even physically. (I am not sure exactly what the creative differences were about.) Later, when the film is focused on the jungle mission the camera is always on the move, tracking left and right, back and forth, sometimes feeling like it was controlled by Sam Fuller. These aggressive tracking shots are interspersed with many long shots of soldiers in nature, sometimes barely seen at all; the humans completely engulfed by nature, like the velociraptors in the tall grass in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg 1997). Often the only sound heard is jungle sounds, without music, and this is especially effective in several battle scenes. And as is typical for Walsh, the film ends with the men high up, on a hilltop.

Objective, Burma! is not the best of the war films of 1945, and it is not the best of Walsh's films, but then the competition is hard. It is a fine film, and even James Agee liked it, which was unusual for him when it came to American war movies. His major problem was with the actors whom he felt did not seem genuine enough, but otherwise he was impressed.

The film feels like it was made after the war ended, as a way of taking stock, but it is worth pointing out that it was made in the summer of 1944, when the war still had one year to go. This is what is most striking about it, besides Walsh's powerful visuals. How bleak and terrifying it is. In combination with the East Asian jungle setting, this is what makes it a precursor to many films about the war in Vietnam.

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Links to my earlier posts about They Were Expendable and The Story of G.I. Joe.
There are no women in Objective, Burma! but otherwise Walsh frequently had women in leading roles. Here are some of them.

They Were Expendable (1945)

They Were Expendable (John Ford 1945) is an unique achievement, but also a quintessential Ford film. It is a war film, but slow, meandering, understated, mellow and open-ended, and is structured around various social events and special moments as is typical for Ford's kind of narration. (Ford usually structures his films this way rather than have a strong forward drive and a focused story. He is very different from Raoul Walsh.) In a post last year, about Robert Warshow, I wrote:

If you watched They Were Expendable (1945), Ford's film about the war in the Pacific and possibly his greatest achievement, and did not know who won the war, you would probably think that the US lost it. Such is the mood of the film. In Peter Bogdanovich book-length interview with John Ford (from 1967) he suggested that Ford's films are about "the glory of defeat" but you could also say that they are about the desolation of victory. 

This is one of the many things that make it both so moving and so exceptional. There is true beauty in They Were Expendable, or several different kinds of beauty.

It tells about a squadron of PT boats in the Pacific stationed outside Manila, on the Philippines, when Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese in 1941. The high command do not think much of these boats and the men who serve on them, they are treated off-handedly and given degrading tasks. The war is not going well either, the Japanese are beating the Americans and taking over one island after another, so the PT boats and their men have to keep moving, evacuating, hiding, escaping. One boat after another is lost, until none remains, and the men are killed off, by bullets or by bombs. But the Japanese themselves are never seen, they are always out of sight, and there is no hostility towards them, not racist talk, even though their ships and their planes bring death and destruction.

Robert Montgomery plays the lead, John Brickley, and John Wayne plays Rusty Ryan. Both are based on two actual sailors, lieutenants John D. Bulkeley and Robert Kelly. There is also Sandy, played by Donna Reed. She is a nurse, and after treating Ryan, suffering from a bullet in the hand and blood poisoning, they become romantically involved, as much as you can in wartime and do not know where you will go next or when you will be killed. But they do manage to go to a dance, and have a dinner, and the occasional phone call, until the inevitable.

Among many outstanding sequences there is a particular one at a hospital during an air raid with the off-screen sound of the bombs the only thing heard. The camera is focused on Sandy's face during an operation, and it captures the fear, the anxiety and the perseverance of the moment, and a claustrophobic counterpoint to the sequences on the open seas. But there are not many of those, they are mostly on land or in the makeshift harbours.

It is not just death and disappointments though; whenever a chance to have a laugh or a drink arises it is taken, however briefly. But the overall mood is downcast.

The setting is various tropical islands in the Pacific, and it looks like it was shot on location, but it was actually shot closer to home, in south Florida, which looked similar enough but was considerably safer. It feels real though, genuine. Robert Montgomery, who plays the lead, had himself been in the navy during the war, and been given a Bronze Star, and he had at one point been on a PT boat with Bulkeley (the man his character is based on) so he knew what he was doing on set. Bulkeley himself did not want to be involved in the making of the film as he disliked jingoism and heroics, but the film has none of that and when he actually saw the film he was pleasantly surprised, feeling that it was "very authentic". Frank Wead, who wrote the script, had also been in the Pacific with the navy during the war (until 1944). Ford himself had spent the war making documentaries in the Pacific, including one about Pearl Harbor and one about the battle of Midway. Joseph H. August, the cinematographer, was a friend of Ford's and they had worked together for a long time, including on the documentary about Midway, so the film was made by people who had, in various ways, been involved themselves in this part of the war. This might account for the powerful feeling of accuracy. Ford obviously meant it as his tribute to these underdog soldiers, and he put all of his considerable skills and idiosyncrasies to make it both true to these men and true to his own poetic sensibility. Whether it is the narrative structure, the use of music, the general mood, the character-behaviour and interactions, it is unmistakeably "a film by John Ford", and one of his very best, on that perennial theme of his: of the forward march of time and history, and of the ordinary people swept away by these forces over which they have little control

Ford directing in the water.

In the end of the film all boats are gone and the remaining sailors are scattered around the islands, some transferred to the infantry. A few manage to get on the last plane out, but those that remain will in all likelihood be killed by the Japanese. We do not know what will happen to them, or to any of the other characters we have met, some briefly, some for a long time. It is war, and you know very little. What will your next assignment be? When will you get food the next time? What happened to your friend, did he survive and will show up later or was he killed? Will you ever see your loved ones again? It is a hard life, so we cry, we bury our dead, and then we move on. What else is there?

The essence of Ford.

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The film was based on a non-fiction book about Bulkeley, also called They Were Expendable, and written by W.L. White.

The Bulkeley quote above about finding the film "very authentic" is from Joseph McBride's book Searching for John Ford.

I have seen They Were Expendable many times, like most of Ford's films, and I have written about several of them before. I could easily write about them all.

The Road to Glory (1936)

1936 was a productive year for Howard Hawks. He made Ceiling Zero, The Road to Glory and much of Come and Get It (until being replaced by William Wyler). They are all fine films, but the focus today will be on The Road to Glory, which takes place during World War 1, in the trenches in France in 1916. It is an unrelentingly bleak film, where almost everybody we get to know dies a painful death, and there seem to be no point to any of the fighting. In one scene a wounded soldier is caught in no-man's land, and his moaning and crying drives the soldiers in the trench crazy. After several failed rescue attempts, which only end with more soldiers being killed or injured, an officer shoots him, putting him out of his misery but perhaps more importantly, putting the other soldiers out of their misery, the misery of hearing him without being able to help.

It was producer Darryl F. Zanuck who instigated the film, and called on Hawks to make it. Hawks and Joel Sayre began working on a script and then Hawks brought in William Faulkner, who was not only a close friend but was also going through a rough time, Nunnally Johnson, who was associate producer, claims he rewrote much of the dialogue, and then finally Hawks and Faulkner put all the various drafts together. It was the second time Faulkner and Hawks collaborated, the first time was Today We Live (1933), from which this script borrowed quite a few things, as it did from Hawks's earlier The Dawn Patrol (1930), both set during World War 1. But it was originally based on the French film Les crois de bois (Raymond Bernard 1932); that film is what Zanuck had as his inspiration and he had bought its rights.

Although The Road for Glory is an American film it has no American characters (the US did not enter the war until 1917), they are all French, portrayed by several fine actors such as Gregory Ratoff and Lionel Barrymore. John Qualen is also among them, although the male lead, and giving the best performance, is Fredric March, who is exceptional as Michel. On occasion he has a mischievous expression, but usually he looks bewildered and tired, and he is always soft-spoken, coming across as a distant observer, not sure what is happening to him and why, but doing his best to keep going and stay alive, and keep the men alive too if possible, What sets him apart from the others is that in the beginning he has not yet lost his hope or his charm, there is more to him than just a desperate, depressed, soldier, but as the film progresses he is losing whatever spark he once had.

Visually The Road to Glory has an expressionistic quality, with mists and shadows, and there are plenty of cramped settings, low-hanging lamps, visible inner ceilings and such. Some war scenes on the other hand almost have the feeling of being journal footage, from a real battle. That might be because it is footage taken from Les crois de bois. It is no surprise that the film looks good because the cinematographer was Gregg Toland, his first film with Hawks. At this time Toland had already began his famous partnership with William Wyler but the look here is different, more intimate.

The Road to Glory is not just bleak, it also has some of the finest and most romantic scenes Hawks ever directed. They involve Michel and Monique, played by June Lang. The first time they meet is during an air raid when they are both seeking shelter in the same basement, He was there first, and is playing on a piano to keep himself together. Then she drops in, and he, who has not seen a woman for some time, almost immediately tries to seduce her, using different methods but failing with all of them. She is not hostile, and there is mutual attraction, but since there is another man in her life she does not want to make things complicated. It is a finely acted and shot scene, and what primarily makes it so good is that they are both so aware of the war, of the falling bombs; the fear is palpable. It is there in the body language, their tone of voice, the way their eyes move, in their actions. Later in the film they go on a date and they return to the same basement, and he plays the piano and sings. "You felt it too, didn't you? Like coming home." he says.

There are some weaknesses in the film, and it mostly concerns the side story about the officer in charge and his father. Especially the last sequence involving them is overtly sentimental and unsubtle. It is like it was directed by somebody else, which might be possible. Fortunately it is not the last scene in the film, because the very last scene is excellent, and also typical of Hawks, as well as Faulkner, It is not so much an ending, things have changed, yes, yet life (or death) goes on almost like nothing had happened.

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The fatalism and stoicism that The Road to Glory is an expression of is not only Hawksian, there is such a strong tendency also in John Ford, and others to. It is a subject for further research.

The details about the scriptwriting process come from Todd McCarthy's Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood.

The Water Diviner (2014)

This week's post is today on Wednesday instead of Friday, for community reasons, and it is a review of one of the two Australian films out now (a rare occurrence).

The best part of The Water Diviner (Russell Crowe 2014) is the beginning, a long wordless sequence when the main character Joshua Connor, played by Crowe, looks for water with his dog, and when he finds a suitable spot he begins to dig, deep into the ground, until he eventually finds it. As this is in rural Australia, and it rarely rains, his ability to find water is a necessary survival skill. This survival skill will also be necessary when he, in 1919, travels from Australia to Turkey to find out what happened to his sons who went to Europe to fight in the First World War. Or rather, to find their bodies and bring them home, since in all likelihood they have all been killed.

This is the story that Russell Crowe has chosen for his first film as a director, a story that is a quintessential Australian story as the First World War and the catastrophic battle at Gallipoli, or the battle of Çanakkale, in 1915, has become, as I have said in an earlier post, a central part of Australia's idea of itself. So The Water Diviner can be seen as a continuation of the story that Peter Weir told in Gallipoli (1981). That was about the going to war, and going through war, this is about the aftermath, of the British and the Australians, together with the Turks, coming to terms with the losses, finding and burying the dead. It is a grisly job. And Joshua Connor wants to be a part of it, to personally look for the remains of his sons. Hughes, the British officer in charge asks the Turkish officer, Captain Hasan, why they should help Connor. "Because of all the fathers, he is the only one who came looking." Hasan answers, in the most moving line in the film.

The scope and ambitions of The Water Diviner are impressive, and covers war, remembrance, imperialism, empires, the foundation of modern Turkey, and reconciliation and forgiveness. Turkey and Australia may have been enemies in the war, but in peace the shared costs make them friends, and not only does Connor and Hasan, form a deep bond, but Connor also falls in love with Ayshe; a Turkish woman, a war widow, and as such initially hostile to Australians such as Connor.

So there are important themes here, and a humanistic message, which is however undermined by the fact that the Greek, with whom Turkey is at war with, are portrayed as pure evil. Considering the Turks had just slaughtered over a million Armenians it is not clear why Greece is singled out in this way. Australia is also criticised, and the British, but they are not demonised as the Greeks are. The Turks are not criticised at all, it seems, only the male chauvinism of Ayshe's brother-in-law. I am not excusing the Greek, they too have a habit of behaving badly, but it seems unfair that they are singled out as uniquely evil. When the Turks pushed back the Greeks there were plenty of atrocities, such as the burning down of Smyrna (now Ízmir) by the Turks in 1922. But that is not mentioned in the film, this is to some extent the Turkish version of events. But it is still remarkable how much the film does engage with several of the geopolitical events at the time, although even for me, who has some knowledge of the history, the film was frequently confusing as so much was only alluded to, or abruptly introduced.

As a director Crowe manages the visual aspects rather well, and there are many impressively shot and staged scenes, but there is also a tendency to visual clichés, both in colour grading and landscapes. Worse though are the frequent errors of judgement both when it comes to the pacing and when it comes to the sentimentality. Some scenes were just plain embarrassing, such as the one in which Connor, Ayshe and her cute son splash water on each other in slow motion. In fact the whole romance between the two, although meaningful for its message of forgiveness and bonding between two countries and two religions, was handled in a clumsy and forced way, and with a rather manly perspective. The growing friendship between Connor and Hasan, played with quiet conviction by Yilmaz Erdogan, was handled much better. Their friendship was convincing, and more profound. There was real beauty there; in the relationship between Ayshe and Connor there was only sentimentality. It does not help that Olga Kurylenko, who plays Ayshe, is unable to add depth or flesh out the character. But she, and the other Turkish characters, at least Turkish with each other and English only with Connor.

The Water Diviner is not a great film, but for all its flaws it is still a commendable effort to teach forgiveness and tolerance. Had the Greeks been left out of the picture, and had there been a better actress than Kurylenko and a surer grasp of pacing and editing, it might even have been a great film.

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This post is one of several posts published today about The Water Diviner. The others, all in Swedish, are below:

Rörliga bilder och tryckta ord:
https://bilderord.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/the-water-diviner-2015

Har du inte sett den?
http://harduintesettden.se/recensioner/water-diviner/

Jojjenito:
https://jojjenito.wordpress.com/2015/05/20/the-water-diviner-2014

Fiffis filmtajm:
http://www.fiffisfilmtajm.se/the-water-diviner/

The other Australian film out now is of course Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller 2015). I like that one more than The Water Diviner, in fact on occasion I was almost jumping up and down in my seat.

A Time to Love and a Time to Die

In the beginning of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (Douglas Sirk 1958) there is a scene where a group of German soldiers at the eastern front see a frozen hand in the snow-covered ground. It is not just the hand, it is clearly attached to a body hidden in the snow. So they dig it out and it turns out it is a comrade of theirs, who had been missing for some time. As the body is removed from its ice package it starts to melt, including the frozen eyeballs, making it look like the dead man is crying.

It is an opening which is both shocking and poetic, and sets the tone of the film very well. A film which is ambitious and unsettling, working on several layers. It is partly a love story, between a young German soldier and a girl he meets when he is on leave for three weeks; it is partly a film about Germany, about a once cultured and civilised country now consumed by death, corruption and despair, where fear and madness has taken hold of the German soul, and how it is perhaps necessary for Germany to be destroyed in order for it to come back to life. But it is also a film by a man, Douglas Sirk, who was German but left it in 1937 with his Jewish wife. Behind stayed his former wife who had become a Nazi and their son who was a soldier in the war and died at the Russian front. So he went back to Germany 14 years after the war to make a film about it, about Germany, and about the son that he had lost (twice, considering the son stayed when Sirk left in 1937.)

It is based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque called Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben which means A Time to Live and a Time to Die. When the book was translated into English the title got the word Love instead of Live, and became more poetic for it. Remarque also plays a part in the film, as a professor hiding from the Gestapo. It is one of several adaptations of his writing, earlier successful efforts include All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone 1930) and Three Comrades (Frank Borzage 1938), but they are not like this film.

At one point a woman is summoned to Gestapo headquarters and as she is not home her husband goes instead. When he gets there he is given a small wooden box and a document to sign. He looks at it with confused eyes and asks "What is this?" The Gestapo clerk says, emotionless, "That is a receipt for the ashes of your wife's father." This is the first they have heard about him for a very long time but for the Gestapo it is just an annoying routine, paper work that must be dealt with. They killed him, now the remains must be handled according to the manual, the signatures collected, the papers rubber stamped and properly filed.

In another scene the young soldier on leave meets an old school-friend by chance, a man who is now an important member of the Nazi party. ("Imagine that. Me, the milkman's son.") He invites the soldier to his home, and asks if he wants to take a bath. The soldier says yes, and after he has taken of his clothes and sat down in the bathtub the other man joins him. Not in the water but he sits on the side of the tub, and they drink wine together, whilst the Party man talks flippantly about concentrations camps. Later there is a party scene in the same house, filled with drunkenness, seductions and self-loathing, close to surreal, that Luchino Visconti might have approved of. An uncomfortable message is that there is no escaping the guilt for what has happened, is happening. "We're only following orders." is not a valid excuse. The only one free of guilt is a Jew hiding in the ruins.

The scene above is set in a museum, destroyed by bombs, in which the young lovers have taken shelter, a poignant symbol of what has been lost, the art and history of Germany a victim, but still there under the wreckage to be brought back for a new generation. As it happened I read W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz (one of the greatest of books) shortly after I had re-watched A Time to Love and a Time to Die and it struck me that the two work well together, as stories about the trauma in the heart of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century.

There are other unforgettable images all through the film, such as a black horse-driven hearse abandoned on a street during a bombing raid, or a rocking horse on fire outside a home, or children's drawings on a wall of bombs falling. As always with Sirk every scene, every shot, every image is a symbol of something larger. By the river in the town a tree is in blossom, although it is too early in the year, not warm enough. But a bomb has started a fire and the heat from the fire, while damaging half of the tree, has made the other half blossom. Life and death, beauty and ugliness, in the same tree, side by side. It is there too in Lilo Pulver's wonderful performance of Elisabeth, the young girl, combining pride, fear and an urge for happiness, always under a deep cloud of sadness. The young soldier, played by John Gavin, is more consumed by doubt and guilt. But the sadness covers him too.

The two young lovers do not have much time, he will soon go back to the Russian front and death is inevitable. So they must date, fall in love, sleep together and get married in just a few days. There is no time for anything but honesty and openness. At the same time they are worried about their families; whether they are alive and, if they are alive, where they are. This is not really a time for love, but love we must because why else go on living?

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Between 1955 and 1959, Sirk made All That Heaven Allows (1955), There's Always Tomorrow (1956), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), A Time to Love and a Time to Die and Imitation of Life (1959), a streak of extraordinary films. He had made fine films before, such as Lured (1947), Has Anybody Seen My Gal (1952) and All I Desire (1953), but it was in those final years he was at his best. Most of them were shot by cinematographer Russell Metty, produced by Ross Hunter (two by Alfred Zugsmith), and with music by Frank Skinner. However, on A Time to Love and a Time to Die, the only member of Sirk's regular crew who participated was Metty. Miklós Rozsa wrote the music and Robert Arthur was producer.

Sirk made two other films between 1955 and 1959, Interlude (1957) and Battle Hymn (1957), but those I have not seen, and they seem to be regarded as minor work, by critics and by Sirk. I will eventually find out for myself.

The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)

One of the greatest scenes in all of cinema is to be found towards the end of The Story of G.I. Joe (William Wellman 1945). Ernie Pyle, an embedded journalist, is spending Christmas with an infantry battalion somewhere in Italy in the year of 1944. It is cold and it is raining and he has gone to the hut where Walker, the officer in charge, is staying. Walker is hungry and dead-tired but up even so, writing letters to the parents of the soldiers killed that day. When Pyle comes in he gives Walker a wing of a grilled chicken, and they then drink some Grappa ("Italian moonshine, you get a purple heart for every third sip," Walker says) and talk about the war. They are weary and freezing, unshaven and unclean, and Walker quotes W.C. Fields that the best cure against insomnia is to get a good night's sleep. Pyle shakes his head whilst talking about the soldiers "who live so miserably, and die so miserably". The scene is simple and so agonisingly real, gaining in strength for being so quiet and calm. The kind of scene where, after it has ended, you want to stop the film, go back, and watch it again,

Ernie Pyle was a real person, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent who was killed later in the war, at Okinawa. He was played by Burgess Meredith in the film. Walker is based on Captain Waskow, who was killed in battle in Italy, and he is played by Robert Mitchum in what is one of his best performances. But in the scene described above it is Meredith that stands out, primarily because of the sounds he is making. He does look and sound like a man who has walked through the mud on a cold night.

Mitchum

Otherwise The Story of G.I. Joe is not all together successful, some scenes feel awkward (partly perhaps because most of the characters are played by soldiers rather than actors). But it is unusual, and for the most part powerful. It is not about glory or victory but about what it is like being the soldiers that have to walk for days in pouring rain only to die in the mud, shot by an unseen enemy. Some go crazy, some cry after their wives. We rarely see any battles, we see the soldiers walk away to battle and then we see the empty faces of those that come back again.

There have been many war films, some good, some bad, some extraordinary. This is one of the good ones, and with a few extraordinary scenes, and for its focus and pathos it deserves to be remembered. This year is celebrates its 70th anniversary, and even if you cannot find the time to watch all of, at least watch those exceptional five minutes of two men celebrating Christmas in despair, under the shadow of imminent death.