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On the verge of a new nightmare, Germany looks back at an old one. Amiable groping overcomes the language barrier between the rowdy Teutonic infantrymen and a local maiden in a French outpost until war intrudes, most pas galant. The young student (Hans Moebus) has a Gallic sweetheart (Jackie Monnier), dodges grenades, is last seen mid-scuffle rolling toward the puddle at the bottom of a crater. The fleeting furlough finds the soldier (Gustav Diessl) back in Berlin, with a mother stuck in endless breadlines and a wife (Hanna Hoessrich) not alone in bed. (Fassbinder retells the scene from another angle in The Marriage of Maria Braun.) In his first talkie, G.W. Pabst plunks down in the winding trenches for a grunt's view of mud and shrapnel, preparing for devastation while hoping for comradeship. The camera tracks alongside a road where wooden crosses are erected against a background of explosions, and then holds still on a patch of mauled terrain as wave after wave of men stumble and die. The music-hall from Paths of Glory is already visible, the remembered daisies of a singalong and the clown's lachrymose geyser are momentary diversions against the barbed wire waiting outside. "Don't break your neck, there's plenty of time to die in battle." Otto Dix's Der Krieg sketches, Dovzhenko's frozen hand (Arsenal) and Peckinpah's lumbering tanks (Cross of Iron), a glass of brandy for the fallen messenger. The shell-shocked officer (Claus Clausen) exits with a salute and a yowl, a conciliatory gesture between supposed enemies at a makeshift infirmary states the anti-nationalistic credo. The Nazi Party's censoring unhappily answers the closing title's question mark. With Fritz Kampers, Else Heller, and Carl Balhaus. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |