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The opening pick-up amid London fog is remembered by Truffaut in The Last Metro. Brother officers on furlough ca. 1914, breezy (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and earnest (Anthony Bushell), "Siamese twins, only they ain't Siamese, and they ain't twins." Between the two stands the childhood neighbor all grown up (Rose Hobart), engaged to the stick despite being in love with the playboy. A toast at the lavish ball, "live while we may, that's my motto," interrupted by a telegram summoning the lads to the French front. A Hawks project abandoned and subsequently revisited (Today We Live, The Road to Glory), realized by Allan Dwan as a split of civilian luxury and military shock and, in the direction of his original star's offspring, a poignant display of journeyman durability. "A hundred yards of hell" in the battlefield, the hero in the middle of it manages to find time for romance: "I say, you will tell the dear duchess I'll be a little late for dinner, won't you?" Vivid technique improves on Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front, panning shots of the screen thundering with horses and machine-gun fire, an explosion in the trenches dissolving rapidly to the Red Cross of an ambulance in motion. Beachside interlude, barbed-wire reconciliation. A certain Gance motif, cp. La Roue, a philosophical general on the Great War's casualties. "It'd be the same if we died in our beds. Things have to go on." Cornwall by way of Santa Barbara, Hollywood anglophilia gently ribbed. "What-ho!" "There isn't a what-ho left in the whole system, old boy." The ending is a somber rhyme to the jaunty introduction, showcasing Dwan's crystalline understanding of gravity and gags. With Mary Forbes, Edmund Breon, Billy Bevan, Tyrell Davis, Florence Britton, Ethel Griffies, and Forrester Harvey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |