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After air (The Dawn Patrol) and water (Today We Live), the tactile soil of World War trenches. The French captain (Warner Baxter) washes down aspirin with cognac, is haunted by casualties and pitied by his mistress, a Red Cross nurse (June Lang). During a raid she meets the young lieutenant (Fredric March), playing the piano in a cellar amid sirens and explosions: "Shhhh. I'm establishing a mood." Off to the front, where the attentive soundscape encompasses the moaning of wounded soldiers, the digging of mines beneath the floorboards, and the whistled "La Marseillaise" that nobody can stand anymore. (Wryly commenting on the enemy coming from below, Gregory Ratoff makes a point of sitting on his steel helmet.) Completing the equation is the captain's father (Lionel Barrymore), a holdover from the imperial days eager to once more sound the charge in "the field of honor." "You're reckless and a bit crazy, but sometimes that helps." Human connection in the face of potential obliteration, toujours, the Howard Hawks battlefield. The terrain is shadowy, smoky, studded with askew crosses, augmented with footage borrowed from Bernard's Les croix de bois. The church doubles as a hospital, a Madonna icon catches the heroine's eye for the prayer not answered. (Sergeant York takes a different tack with "that old time religion.") The hunger for glory, the fear of death, the bag of mementos left from a life lost. The veteran seized by horror finds redemption by guiding his blinded son in a sacrificial mission, the observation post explodes but not before the bugle is heard one last time. "A soldier doesn't find moments of beauty so when one comes along he snatches at it." The coda contrasts with Ford's in Fort Apache. With Victor Kilian, Paul Stanton, and John Qualen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |