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Franju in Hôtel des Invalides remembers Ernst Lubitsch's introductory fusillade of images, so does Peckinpah in Cross of Iron—military parades framed by a veteran's missing leg, traumatized patients quaked by commemorative cannonades, boots and holsters and sabers in church. One year since the Armistice and the young French soldier (Phillips Holmes) cannot forget the staring corpse in the trenches, guilt and horror squash the former musician's soul. "I wanted to bring beauty to this world, and I brought... murder." Priests are a little too quick with absolution, killing during war is still killing, a trip to the dead German's village is in order. The family is frozen in sorrow, the father (Lionel Barrymore) nurses the ticking clock in the locked room while the mother (Louise Carter) tries commiserating with fellow mourners by sharing cinnamon cake recipes in the graveyard. In the Berlin jester's most somber charade, the loudest laugh is that of the moneyed clod (Lucien Littlefield) wooing the grieving fiancée (Nancy Carroll), he turns out to be head of the town's nationalist circle. "A dead world" separating people, where Lubitsch's theme of role-playing becomes remarkably spectral. The tremulous visitor is a potential spy to suspicious locals, to the relatives of the man he's killed he's an instrument of morbid sublimity. (Ford in Pilgrimage accomplishes a similarly uncanny effect.) The Old Guard's bigotry is laid bare at the Bierhalle, the doctor's renunciation follows sharply: "My heart's with the young, dead and living." Hope is a beautiful harmony of image and sound, off-screen violin and piano for the family named after the poet who once wrote that "where danger is, deliverance also grows." With Zasu Pitts, Tom Douglas, Frank Sheridan, George Bickel, and Emma Dunn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |