Powerful anti-war film

In the film The Red and The White Hungarian director Miklos Jansco examines War while stripping away all rhetoric, patriotism and duty. Set in 1919 during the Russian Civil War in the Volga region, the two sides–the Reds (Bolsheviks) and the particularly demonic Whites battle for control of a monastery. When the film begins, Whites pursue a handful of Reds, and a cold, cruel slaughter takes place.

Killing is seen as meaningless sport as men are stripped and hunted while they seek safety. Has killing become so boring and mundane that it must be spiced up for variety? Insanity reigns as the battles spill over to the peasants who are just trying to mind their own business and eek out a living. The fact that all this violence takes place against a gorgeous, natural landscape just makes it more absurd and more tragic. The plot doesn’t focus on any particular characters and instead records minor skirmishes and major moral transgressions. In a sense the characters and what exactly they’re fighting for is superfluous as Individualism is subsumed by death and survival. Without a great deal of dialogue, Jancso examines War stripped of deceptive rhetoric, and what is left is ugly, cold, and meaningless.

For an anti-war film, it doesn’t get much better than The Red and The White. Jancso’s message is clear, and he deliberately leaves the viewer without characters to invest in, and without a cause to cheer for. The result is depressing carnage. In Hungarian and Russian with English subtitles.

“If only knowing were the same as feeling.”

Based on the novel by Rebecca West, the film The Return of the Soldier is the story of a man who returns from WWI with severe shell shock resulting in memory loss. When the film begins, Chris’s wife Kitty (Julie Christie) and cousin Jenny (Ann Margret) are in the splendid Baldry home when they receive a visitor, Mrs. Margaret Grey (Glenda Jackson). The visitor is clearly uncomfortable, and at first it seems that perhaps this can be blamed on her poverty. But then Mrs. Grey breaks the news that Captain Chris Baldry is ill in hospital. Naturally Kitty and Jenny both wonder why the war office didn’t inform them, and Kitty takes her skepticism one step further by accusing Mrs. Grey of possessing ulterior motives.

Some of the mystery is solved when Kitty and Jenny travel to London to collect Captain Baldry (Alan Bates). He’s shell-shocked, and has lost the memory of the past 20 years of his life. He has no recollection of his wife or his marriage, and instead thinks he’s still in the throes of a mad passionate love affair with Margaret Grey–or Margaret Allington as he knew her 20 years ago when she was the daughter of an inn-keeper.

The Return of the Soldier is a stunningly beautiful, sad novel, and it’s translated to the screen very well in this film version with most of the book’s dialogue remaining intact. Cousin Jenny narrates the novel, so her insights and observations are gone for the film, and the script wisely enhances Kitty’s character slightly in recompense. Kitty is portrayed as a shallow woman who is humiliated by her husband’s rejection of their relationship. A few bitter moments show both Kitty’s anger (directed at her husband and Margaret) and snobbery (spitefully directed towards Margaret). The prejudice against shell shock is shown in others’ treatment of Baldry, and even Kitty in frustration argues that “if he just made an effort,” he’d remember. When a psychologist (Ian Holm) is called to the scene, he gently argues against a cure. Why bring Captain Baldry’s mind back across the abyss of time and memory when so much he has to remember will simply make him unhappy?

The Return of the Soldier is a marvelously realized film–the contrast of Baldry’s peaceful, magnificent estate against the horrors and ugliness of WWI are seen in powerful opposition to one another. The film sensibly concentrates on the visual–Baldry’s shock when looking in a mirror, and the way in which a train whistle startles him. The main characters are well cast, and although I imagined Margaret physically quite different, Glenda Jackson’s steely presence and moral courage capture the essence of the character. Alan Bates’ quietly restrained performance accentuates the pain of a kind, good-hearted man managing to drift through his daily obligations with just the vaguest recollection of who everyone is. Fans of the novel will not be disappointed.

“The newspapers want only lies and official idiocy.”

In post WWI France, Major Delaplane (Philippe Noiret) is given the grisly task of identifying dead soldiers. There are still 350,000 soldiers unaccounted for–a figure that Delaplane marvels over from time to time as he speculates how so many bodies could just disappear. In spite of the gruesome nature of Delaplane’s work, he manages to keep sight of his goal, and in just two months, he’s put names to 51,000 bodies. He keeps a scrupulous filing system inside his ad hoc headquarters–with drawers full of details of the dead.

Delaplane receives orders that a body is needed for burial as the ‘unknown soldier’ under the Arc de Triomphe. For a man determined to identify every dead soldier, this order goes against both his drive for meticulous organisation and his code of morality. While the government obsesses about the fact that the body should not be that of a foreigner, Delaplane is distressed about the selection of a body that will never be identified once buried in state.

Delaplane’s mission to identify soldiers remains largely unemotional, and this is in contrast to the reaction of relatives who pick over the battlefields desperately looking for artifacts of their loved ones. Delaplane and his team rush to the newly discovered site of a train wreck hoping to retrieve and identify bodies left intact from an explosion. Delaplane’s team dig out the bodies–which have been remarkably preserved in clay soil for over two years, and meanwhile the relatives pick over retrieved objects from the soldiers’ belongings. In a surreal scene, relatives are almost joyful if they discover a personal memento, for then they will have a body to bury.

Wealthy Irene de Courtil (Sabine Azema) explodes into Delaplane’s life as she searches for her missing husband. She’s not one of the faceless masses content to pick over the artifacts of the dead, and she demands Delaplane’s personal attention to her husband’s disappearance. Delaplane, at first, brushes off Irene’s persistent demands for help, but then her passionate search for news of her husband breaks through his layers of protective, unemotional efficiency.

By examining the neglected cinematic territory of exactly what happens to the thousands who simply ‘disappear’ during wartime, Life and Nothing But tackles a grim subject. In many ways, the film’s treatment of this subject is far more poignant than standard battle scenes. The war is over, and 350,000 missing people are reduced to mere loose ends, and the sooner those loose ends are dealt with, then the sooner the living can move on. The film’s sub-plot–involving an unemployed schoolteacher who searches for her fiance–unfortunately weakens the story with triviality and coincidence. Director Bertrand Tavernier assembles an impressive cast. The settings are perfect and blend just the right amount of human anguish against the cold sterility of bureaucratic nonchalance. Major Delaplane’s disgust at the awards, medals and ceremonies necessary to glorify mass slaughter is a marvelously understated message of the utter waste of war. In French with English subtitles.

“I told myself they died for a reason, but I can’t find that reason.”

The Ground Truth is a documentary that should be watched by everyone who has a friend, relative or loved one who’s served–or is about to serve–in Iraq and Afghanistan. The film’s premise is that military personnel return home with baggage from the war, and that the severity of this baggage is all too often ignored. Take the case of 23-year-old Jeff Lucey–for example. He returned home, and while his family realized he had changed, they had no idea to what degree, but the burden of guilt he carried led him to commit suicide by hanging himself with a garden hose. “The Ground Truth” brings Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to the fore and expresses the idea that due to the nature of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD is a widespread, but mostly ignored problem, in returning veterans.

The film begins with footage of “Recruiting Induction” at Virginia Beach, and then interviews various veterans. They basically say the same thing–the Basic Training process dehumanizes the recruit and prepares him to kill, but what happens when the seasoned soldier returns home after, let’s say 1, 2 or 3 tours in Iraq? How does that soldier adjust to civilian life? The film’s many interviews reinforce the idea that Iraq and Afghanistan are particularly difficult conflicts due to the civilian casualties. Many of those interviewed stress that the deaths of their friends and the killing of civilians haunts them today, and while they effectively ‘turn this off’ while in combat, nonetheless, it remains and emerges later.

There are many stories here–the Afghanistan medic who’s haunted by the alleged al-qaeda insurgent who was hung by his hands by three days until gangrene set in. After his hands were amputated, it was discovered that he was perfectly innocent after all, so he was set free. Many of those interviewed are haunted by images of dead children. Wives and girlfriends of veterans express the knowledge that the person who returned is not the person who left. Some of those veterans interviewed stress that they returned home and began to feel safer if they slept with guns under the bed or carried guns around with them all the time. One decorated soldier recalls how he went berserk at a party and ended up facing a lengthy jail sentence in a federal prison before he woke up to the fact that he needed help.

On the subject of ‘help’ the film explores the military’s treatment of PTSD and the manner in which returning soldiers are asked if they are experiencing symptoms. Some veterans are blissfully unaware that they have lingering problems until months later when they begin experiencing episodes of rage. Other soldiers continue to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan–in spite of the fact they’re being treated for PTSD.

Those interviewed include former marine Stan Goff, plus veterans Perry O’Brien, Robert Acosta, Sean Huze, Aidan Delgado, and Camilo Mejia. The interviews are impressive, courageous, sincere and thoughtful. There’s a great deal to mull over here for anyone troubled by the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s clear the cost to humanity goes beyond X billion dollars. When it comes to the problems experienced with the VA, some additional personal stories would have helped bolster the documentary. Delays and difficulties are alluded to–especially when it comes to getting appropriate treatment but this issue could stand additional exploration. DVD extras include a deleted scene and an extended scene, and viewers should note that some of the film’s footage is graphic.

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority.”

The film Behind the Lines, based on the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker, is a fictionalized account of real-life events that occurred during WWI. The film begins with a quick scene depicting the protest of WWI poet and highly decorated soldier, Siegfried Sassoon who reads a short statement protesting the war to military officials. Sassoon’s act creates a dilemma–he can either be court-martialed (and possibly shot) or declared insane and shipped off to the mental hospital at Craiglockhart in Scotland.

Thanks largely to the intervention of Robert Graves (Dougray Scott), Sassoon is shipped off to Craiglockhart, and Sassoon is angry about the decision. He knows he’s perfectly sane, and to be declared insane is to diminish his protest.

The film traces the stories of several soldiers at Craiglockhart–along with their psychiatrist, the soft-spoken Dr. Rivers (Jonathan Pryce). Rivers is even ready to use guilt to persuade Sassoon to return to the front, and it’s clear that Rivers’ job presents a moral dilemma–as a healer, it’s his goal to help restore his patients to mental health, but to do so will guarantee their return to the very situation that created their mental problems in the first place. The convoluted morality of the situation erodes Rivers’ confidence in his mission at several points, and it’s further complicated when he visits a professional colleague who brags about a swift 100% success rate.

Once at the hospital, Sassoon befriends fellow soldier and poet, Wilfred Owens (Stuart Bunce), and another story thread follows the treatment of mute soldier Billy Prior (Jonny Lee Miller) whose case illustrates the class division between treatments for enlisted men vs. officers. According to Dr. Rivers, the “lower ranks suffer from mutism” while the officer class exhibit stammers, and Rivers even argues that the dreams of enlisted men are less complicated. This is a statement based on obvious class prejudices, and of course it leads the viewer to conclude why Craiglockhart is stuffed with officers, and also ponder exactly how the lower classes were treated when it came to shell shock.

Naturally, since the film focuses on the horrors of WWI, some of the scenes are extremely graphic. And these scenes are even more horrific since they are in stark contrast to the beauty and tranquility of the Craiglockhart grounds. The sub-plot involving the romance between Prior and a local lass was somewhat distracting, but this was a decent film overall–directed by Gillies MacKinnon.

 “Even good men thought by going to war they would win a kind of honour.”

Sword of Honour is an excellent made-for-British television film based on the Evelyn Waugh trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, & The End of the Battle, and the novels are brilliantly adapted for the screen by William Boyd. The hero of the drama–idealistic, solid, and dependable 35-year-old Guy Crouchback (Daniel Craig) plagued by notions of chivalry, honour and heroic endeavors seeks a commission as an officer during WWII. At first he’s rejected for being too old, but then his wealthy family’s connections pay off, and Guy finds himself training for the Royal Corps of Halberdiers.

The Halberdiers are just the first stop for Guy as a military officer. Eventually transferred to the commandos, Guy’s adventures include missions to Crete, Egypt and Croatia, and each step of the way, Guy’s belief system is assaulted by the realities of war. To Guy’s sense of honour, war should provide the opportunity to act for the collective good, but instead, his experiences reveal instances of supreme selfishness, and the abandonment of all morality in the face of self-preservation.

Some of the challenges to Guy’s beliefs are the absurdities he encounters–the war-loving Brigadier General Ritchie-Hook (Robert Pugh) for example, whose efforts to possess a portable toilet known as a Thunderbolt end in demolition. But other experiences cannot align with Guy’s naive notions of a war between “good and evil” conducted under honourable conditions by noble warriors. Guy witnesses the callousness of officers to the fate of the enlisted men, and the “expendability” of the relatively unimportant. This is an inept system in which scam artists, liars, and cowards thrive.

Episodes in Guy’s military career are woven with interludes in his personal life. While WWII is raging in Europe, there’s a certain segment of the British population who are whooping it up, and Guy’s capricious, materialistic, self-centered ex-wife Virginia (Megan Dodds) maneuvers her way through life–leaving a trail of abandoned lovers behind. To her, war is a mere inconvenience that may force a cancellation of the next party. Since Virginia moves in the upper class military set, it is Guy’s destiny to periodically meet Virginia, her other ex-husbands and ex-lovers. It is in his relationship with Virginia that Guy is shown as his most naive and vulnerable. In spite of Virginia’s appalling behaviour, Guy still cherishes romantic notions for his ex-wife and sees her as a damsel-in-distress.

This 191 minute–2 DVD set is wonderfully entertaining and stuffed full of the sort of rich characters expected from the witty, savage pen of Evelyn Waugh. There’s the fatuous pompous Major Hound (Robert Daws), the spit and polish, highly decorated Ivor Claire (Tom Wisdom) who acquires his medals under questionable circumstances, the opportunistic Ludovic (Guy Henry) who gathers material for his novel, and Trimmer McTavish (Richard Coyle)–the ‘hero’ of operation Popforce. Waugh fans should be delighted with this marvelous, entertaining, and well-acted satire.

 “I cannot accept such an order unless it is in writing.”

The film Paths of Glory is set in WWI France in 1916. The story is loosely based on events that took place during the Battle of Verdun. When the film begins, the war between the Germans and the French has reached an impasse. The armies are bogged down in their trenches, and battles are fought over a few feet of ground. General Mireau is approached by General Broulard to use the 701st Regiment to take the “Ant Hill.” Mireau, at first, dismisses the idea as he is quite aware that it’s a suicide mission, but then he becomes seduced by the idea that he stands to be perceived as a “fighting general.” Mireau agrees to launch the already exhausted regiment at the Ant Hill on an appointed day. Mireau approaches Colonel Dax of the 701st, (Kirk Douglas) and reveals his plan. Dax is also aware that the plan is suicide, and he lays out the projections for the numbers of dead. On the appointed day of the attack, the weather conditions are extremely unfavourable, but the suicide mission goes ahead as planned.

As predicted, many men are slaughtered in the insane assault. In the aftermath of the attack, General Mireau comes unglued by the defeat, and so after the assault is over, he looks for somewhere to cast blame. He states: “one way to maintain discipline is to shoot a man now and then.” Three soldiers are selected to go on trial for cowardice, and if they are found guilty, the punishment is execution. Colonel Dax defends the men against the accusation that the assault was lost as a result of their cowardice.

This early Stanley Kubrick film was made in 1957, and the film was banned in several countries for its controversial anti-war stance. This is a very tight little film with no frills or wasted scenes. The subject matter could so easily have been overdone with excessive sentimentality, but the sentiment here is sparse. But in spite of its low budget and low sentimentality factor, the film manages to create extremely powerful battle scenes. The black and white photography really lends itself to the gloom of the trenches and to the assault against the Ant Hill. Scenes depicting the horror of the trenches are compared to the lives the Generals lead in opulent chateaus, full of exquisite and delicate furniture. The generals still have time for balls and banquets while their men die unnoticed in the trenches. Kubrick does a good job of showing the class differences between the enlisted men and the officers. The enlisted men are viewed as sub-human and quite expendable. While the bullets fly, the generals, safe in their luxurious palaces, send men down the Paths of Glory (war and death) with the same old rhetoric and flag-waving. These same generals are ready with criticism against those who give life and limb for a piece of dirt. Paths of Glory is one of three great anti-war films from Stanley Kubrick–the two others are Full Metal Jacket and Dr Strangelove. It’s good to see Kirk Douglas in these early roles, as it’s very easy to see his power as an actor. I recommend Paths of Glory for those interested in Kubrick’s career or for those wishing to watch an intensely powerful antiwar film.

“Something odd is afoot.”

Joyeux Noel is based on a series of real life-incidents that occurred during WWI on Xmas Eve 1914. According to many sources, on several locations along the front, soldiers from opposing sides put down their arms and mingled. Joyeux Noel takes true incidents that took place and then blends them into a story–focusing on just one tiny area where French, Scottish and German troops are involved in the brutal war from the filth and squalor of their trenches.

The film begins with very brief sketches of exactly how some of the film’s major protagonists found themselves wallowing in the blood and gore of WWI. There are two Scottish brothers who eagerly embraced war–with one brother welcoming volunteering with the phrase, “At last, something’s happening in our lives.” And there’s the German opera singer Sprink (Benno Furmann) who leaves his career and his beautiful lover and singing partner Anna Sorenson (Diane Kruger) in order to enlist.

The worlds the soldiers left behind are soon replaced with the horrors of the trenches. A senseless, suicidal assault led by the French and the Scots on the Germans results in mangled bodies of the dead lying in the snow. Some men die and some men survive. And then it’s Xmas Eve in the trenches, and each side attempts to eek out a meager sense of celebration for a few hours at least. The Germans, led by Horstmayer (Daniel Bruhl) have received a number of Xmas trees, and they attempt to decorate their trench. A spontaneous event takes place, and the three sides declare a truce and mingle.

The film’s strong pacifist message resonates long after the story concludes, and the plot makes it clear that the officers who are later held accountable feel a strong sense of camaraderie with their fellow soldiers–while they feel remote from the higher-ups who issue orders from the comfort of palaces well behind the lines. Naturally, the military hierarchy will not tolerate fraternization between opposing forces–after all it threatens their war and may even lead to humanization of the enemy. And the film does an excellent job of conveying the fact that the Xmas Eve incidents are viewed with horror and are seen as threats to the continuance of hostilities. Soldiers ‘contaminated’ by the event must be isolated, removed and punished.

The film’s subplot romance between the opera singers unfortunately lessens the film’s power. The story here of the spontaneous connections created by the soldiers who are in theory engaged in a battle to the death–but see themselves as fellow victims of tyrannical decisions–is so fantastic it almost seems too hard to believe. The element of the romance spoilt the story and lessened the film’s power by pulling away the focus from the men and the commonality of their experience. Directed by Christian Carion, the film is in French, German and English.

“In the last 4 years, my god, my king and my country have stripped me of everything I ever cared for.”

This eloquent BBC version of the stirring memoir, Testament of Youth chronicles the years 1913-1925 in the life of Vera Brittain–a feminist, a writer and also one of the 20th Century’s greatest pacifists. When the film begins, Vera (Cheryl Campbell) the daughter of a merchant lives in Northern England. Her brother, Edward (Rupert Frazer) is at school and he will soon attend Oxford. Vera also longs to attend university, but her parents consider that education is not a proper choice for females as it tends to make them mannish and unmarriageable. Encouraged by Edward, Vera begins attending local lectures while desperately nursing her ambition to attend Oxford.

Just as she manages to gain her parents’ permission to attend Somerville College, Oxford, WWI interrupts Vera’s life. At first she sees the war as a terrible inconvenience–a bother that looms distantly on the horizon, and a nuisance that has little to do with her. She is, therefore, shocked to learn that her brother and his best friend Roland (Peter Woodward) intend to volunteer. It’s beyond her comprehension that they should sacrifice a university education for vague notions of patriotism. But both Roland and Edward make it clear that war is an unassailable territory exclusively for males, and they express the feeling that they don’t want to left out of the ‘action’. To them–and their intimate inner circle–to not participate would mean they carry a “stain” for the rest of their lives.

Vera finds herself swept up in WWI. As the fiance of Roland Leighton, she sees him shipped to the front in France, and she also waves her brother goodbye when he too is shipped overseas. Vera finds herself unable to continue with her university education, and instead she volunteers as a nurse and is eventually transferred to the front lines. Here, she nurses wounded and dying Germans under the most horrendous conditions.

Scenes at the front and in the havoc of makeshift, overcrowded hospitals contrast with the time Vera spends at home on leave where her parents live stubbornly in a world of their own–complaining about the lack of good servants, the parsimonious food supply, and demanding that she return home to ‘help out’. But the film treats all its characters with generosity, and in time, it’s clear that Vera’s parents’ stance is just another coping mechanism. The film does an excellent job of showing how Vera is torn by conflicting demands in an era when women’s roles were severely dictated by society and yet also rapidly changing. Peppered with marvelously strong characterizations–including Winfred Holtby, Vera’s dearest friend, the powerful drama is accompanied by excerpts of Leighton’s letters and poetry.

This beautifully acted, brilliant adaptation directed by Moira Armstrong captures the raw power of Brittain’s memoir, and the fact that Vera’s story is true, makes the film (and the book) exactly as the title suggests–a powerful “testament” against war. Gradually, over time, Vera’s belief system is shaken to its foundations as her illusions of patriotism and the nobility of war are stripped away and replaced with anger, loss and grief. Vera struggles with futility and anguish as those she loves best become statistics in a senseless bloodbath.

Testament of Youth is a 4 VHS set, and in spite of the fact this is a production from the late 70s, the film is remarkably good quality. Details on this boxed set state that it’s 200 minutes long with each tape 50 minutes. But, this is a 5 part series with two episodes on the first tape, so in reality the film is about 250 minutes long. If you are at all interested in WWI, feminist figures or pacifism, then this first class BBC drama is well worth watching.