Nosh 181: '1917' & More

David Elliott

         

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.

APPETIZER (Review of 1917)                    

1917

Back when I ushered at the Clark, Bruce Trinz’s great revival theater in downtown Chicago, I noticed a rather fragile old man who often came for the daily double-bills. He preferred comedies and Westerns, yet I once asked if he had seen Kubrick’s stunning World War I movie Paths of Glory. “Just one time,” he said in a frail, papery voice. “It was rather hard for me.” Alfred confided having fought as a Canadian “Tommy” in the trenches, hospitalized after a gas attack. And who was the most famous gas victim (sadly, not fatal) of those trenches? Adolf Hitler, whose payback gift was an even more awful war.

Sam Mendes’s grim and sometimes grisly 1917, elaborated from stories told him by his grandfather, a WWI veteran, tells of two British lance corporals sent as messengers across mostly depopulated but very dangerous ground in April 1917 (the war’s most famous messenger was … Corporal Adolf Hitler). The only two actors with proven star power are at the start (Colin Firth as the puffy general who sends the message) and finish (Benedict Cumberbatch as the haggard colonel who receives it). The one-page message is to two British battalions (1,600 men), set to advance into a salient (wedge in the front line) evacuated by retreating Germans. They don’t know it’s a trap, a deadly new battle line of trenches, guns and grisly barbed wire. As the “Huns” cut the buried phone lines,  personal delivery, mostly by foot, is ordered. A puzzler: since Firth got his new intel from photo “aerials” shot by biplanes (we see some, flying in clear skies), why not parachute the message canister from a plane to Cumberbatch? (Easy answer: no movie.)

Let’s not get hung up on the barbed wire of pesky details, for Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, the odd Gulf War movie Jarhead) has a vision to stage, lavishly. One promo pitch is that 1917 was shot in a continuous “real time” take, but I don’t believe it. There are obvious blackout moments and time shifts for cuts, and today’s digital editing has a deft way of fusing continuity. The great unbroken tale remains Alexander Sokorov’s Russian Ark (2002), his dream-poetic streaming of Russian history through St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace/Hermitage Museum.

1917 is a stream of set pieces, and its flowing tensions have an almost seamless effect. As messengers Blake and Schofield, Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay have the vulnerable, patriotic bravery of many privates and junior officers in past combat films, though neither has Lew Ayres’s stunning breakthrough in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Here is a heartfelt saga of courage, endurance and loss. 1917 has been a hit, and if it brings this terrible war that changed history to young viewers who don’t know Ayres from Aerosmith, and for whom the Somme and Ypres and the Argonne are more distant than the space battles of Star Wars, then more power to it.

It’s a moving movie, but a great movie? No. The performances are adroit sketches, never rivaling the best in WWI films (see list below). Scenes often feel like storyboards trundled into place by a team of art directors. Bleached skies create a slightly blue-screen effect (and the one aerial dogfight looks like CGI). But Roger Deakins is a terrific photographer whose shots have depth and impact, like the ruined French village, a lunar deathscape of despair. The touches add up (rats, bloated horses, staring corpses, endless trenches, the shock of ambush), though the abandoned German bunkers are too tidy even for Germans, and many uniforms appear remarkably natty for this muddy, blasted hell.

After you’ve seen the waste and carnage in Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, with WWI colorized back into startling life and death, you might find Mendes’s salute to his grandfather’s comrades a touch glib. He resorts to some quaint devices, with bits that echo chipper, derring-do pages in old English magazines like Chums and Boy’s Own Paper, and also silent films. Schofield finds a bucket of clean, drinkable milk in a war-ravaged barn, and later serves it to a sweet French madonna and a baby in that devastated village (at least there is no iris shot of wistful farewell). Corn is a cereal that movies, even big, sincere movies like this, will never exhaust, but 1917 does pack a punch. 

SALAD (A List)

12 Really Strong Movies About World War I

Listed in my order of preference:
The Grand Illusion (1937, Jean Renoir directing Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay), Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean directing Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif), Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick directing Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou), The African Queen (1951, John Huston directing Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn), They Shall Not Grow Old (2019, Peter Jackson “directing” real British soldiers), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone directing Lew Ayres, Louis Wolheim), The Spy in Black (1939, Michael Powell directing Conrad Veidt, Valerie Hobson), Life and Nothing But (1989, Bertrand Tavernier directing Phillipe Noiret, Sabine Azema), La Grande Guerra (1959, Mario Monicelli directing Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman), Westfront 1918 (1930, G.W. Pabst directing Claus Clausen, Gunter Diessl), Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir directing Mel Gibson, Mark Lee) and King and Country (1964, Joseph Losey directing Dirk Bogarde, Tom Courtenay).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The Germans of World War I were never more generously depicted than by Dita Parlo, as the peasant mother who gives refuge to fleeing French POWs in Renoir’s La Grande Illusion. Seeing her in that, and in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, Orson Welles decided “that she had the dark, European exoticism that he wanted to play the female lead in his first movie, Heart of Darkness.” Growing costs and dark themes scuttled the RKO project, and Parlo never had an American career. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Orson Welles would work with many exotic European beauties, including Romy Schneider as Leni in The Trial. She “pulls Joseph K (Tony Perkins) into a storage room, drapes a heavy coat over him and vows, ‘I am going to make love to you.’ They slide down a pile of old files and papers, lightning crackles outside and Joseph looks squeamish. Leni asks if he has any physical defects, and then eagerly reveals a translucent membrane on her left hand.” (From the Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

With little combat, The Grand Illusion is the supreme World War I movie, partly thanks to the aristocratic exchanges between Pierre Fresnay’s noble French captive de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and Erich von Stroheim’s German camp commander Von Rauffenstein (France, 1937; director Jean Renoir, d.p. Christian Matras and Claude Renoir).

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