Tag Archives: WWII

Bitter Victory (1957)

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“He and you and I will become a part of history — of its futility” – Richard Burton as Jim Leith

Bitter Victory is a curious confluence of talents and material. Nicholas Ray was earmarked to helm this British war movie with French-American backing. Aside from the primary leads, the rest of the cast was purportedly decided by lottery.

The film’s aesthetic is somehow impeccably represented by the wide array of combat dummies shot in black in white accentuating the muted tones of a rational military drama. It’s instigated by a secret mission behind enemy lines in Benghazi. This is North Africa during WWII.

There are two men being considered to lead the excursion: A curt, lifelong soldier Major Brand (Curd Jurgens). He’s by the book and adamant no one see his weakness. Then, a young, handsome fellow named Captain Leigh (Richard Burton) with a certain no-nonsense perspicuity and a background in ancient artifacts, not the mechanisms of war. He’s volunteered to serve his country. Whatever that means.

There are some pleasantries, and they take off to the club for the enlisted, a momentary calm before the work at hand. Thrown into the narrative as we are, it becomes apparent these are characters with some kind of overlapping history in a broad sense, and we become aware of their subtext involving a woman (Ruth Roman).

At first, it isn’t so engaging. The soldier with the sound effects and pyrotechnics at the bar seems to do more with his inebriated histrionics than them. Still, Ray ends the mounting sequence with a kiss in a carriage. Except before we see it in full, the carriage whisks away in this brilliant bit of kinetic energy playing out on the screen.

Roman is more mature and less delicate than we’ve ever seen her, partially thanks to the military garb but also due to the men she’s kept in her life. They’ve toughened her even as they grapple with romance.

It’s hardly a movie of jingoism as Burton represents a kind of jaundiced pessimism that would be his closest companion in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold as well. He’s hardly an adherent to wartime hero worship. And if Jurgens is beholden to the strictures of military protocol, he certainly doesn’t allow them to make him a joyful spirit. He’s constantly living life dictated by honor, fear, and his own inadequacies in command.

But we must remember there is a task at hand. They gather their company of recruits. Their plans are relayed through a model in a control room and curiously everyone seems to laugh off what might happen if their transportation a la humpback camel doesn’t make it to their rendezvous.

Soon they’ve become robed infiltrators cloaked by night loitering around the streets under Nazi occupation. Murder in the dark is silent though no less traumatic when it comes, even when it involves taking the life of an enemy in the line of duty.

These mission scenes have a clean and efficient luster, hardly dawdling when it comes to the action and as they disappear into the night and fight a skirmish over the sand dunes, it’s another perfect encapsulation of their clandestine task.

But the futility rushes back to Captain Leigh when it comes to the wounded. An enterprising soldier suggests getting a stretcher for a fallen comrade — but the pragmatist notes they would bleed to death in an hour — so the soldier goes down to offer a cigarette as a final consolation. He has an inherent human kindness and there’s something in Burton’s eyes as he watches. Is it regret or helplessness? Such decent showings of goodwill don’t come easily to him.

For some explicable reason, he stays behind as the others move forward. It might have been an order, but it might as well be to spite his superior. Whatever the reason, it’s hardly as baffling as Jurgens being cast as an Allied soldier. It feels like a gross mischaracterization no fault of his own.

Bitter Victory does continue to tease out a version of the love triangle involving  David and Bathsheba where the man in the position of power is jealous for another man’s wife. Here the tables are turned. At the same time, the movie does feel like the antithesis of many “men on a mission” movies because it rarely feels bloated by pace, set pieces, and bits of narrative exposition and execution.

The character conflict becomes of greater interest than the actual task at hand. This is the movie’s wellspring because Burton and Jergens cultivate a mutual distaste throughout the entire movie. It continuously simmers and reaches the extremes of venomous vitriol. It’s more poisonous than the Germans, or even scorpions up a pant leg.

Burton bemusedly admits, “I kill the living and I save the dead,” and yet he still manages to scoff at his superior. “You have the Christian decency that forbids killing the dying man, but approves the work of a sharpshooter.” War so often seems to operate in baffling hypocrisies. It doesn’t make sense nor are the outcomes of war particularly equitable. They never have been.

When Roman clings to the arm of one of the barracks mannequins for support, her innate tenderness makes it feel like a totem for the man who didn’t come back. Again, it’s this dissonance of conflicting moods and emotions — what the military exonerates and exults in the service of duty and what the present company of soldiers standing by knows to be actually true.

The visual metaphor becomes even more overt when the same dummy is pinned with a medal. It comes to represent the core dilemma of the movie caught between duty, heroism, and the very manner in which we express and memorialize our sense of wartime. There are no easy answers. By the time Burton and Ray are done with us, they’ve blistered us to our core. You know a war picture has probably succeeded when it galls you and leaves you even momentarily disconsolate.

3.5/5 Stars

Berlin Express (1948)

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Added to the landscape of The Third Man, Germany Year Zero, and A Foreign Affair, Berlin Express is a fascinating portrait in the rubble-film genre. These are the pictures on the cutting edge of filmic history, shooting on-location in the post-war world that was still licking its wounds and putting the pieces back together across France, Germany, and really any other place that was directly affected.

Although we see the IG Farben Building — famously Eisenhower’s command post after the end of the war — it’s the bombed-out world surrounding it that proves the most telling. Even as the newsreel narration feels overbearing after a certain point (it doesn’t have the wry verve of Carol Reed), we’re getting to see elements of the world as it was at that precise moment. Jacques Tourneur is at his best with evocative canvasses to work against, and the post-war landscape certainly fits the bill.

It is a different take on The Third Man milieu. You get the seedy, grungy impoverished nature of the world, tramping around the train station where men fall to the ground for a dropped cigarette while peddling any miserable trinket they possibly can.

But the drama also considers the zones of the newly divided Germany by calling up characters of each rank and nationality. They are all very overtly represented and implicated in this story.

It commences with a train loaded with passengers of all different nationalities who make for a convenient focal point for our story because they come to represent the Allies looking to consolidate power and pave the way for the Cold War in a decaying imperialistic society.

One can’t help but think of archetypal train tales like Christie’s Murder on The Orient Express or Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. However, the movie shares more in common with The Narrow Margin than some may realize. Even Charles McGraw, who would play the protagonist in the later Richard Fleischer B picture fills a part in this one.

Here he’s helping to smuggle a very crucial German leader (Paul Lukas) across the country to help the reunification efforts. The remnants of the Nazis would love to get their hands on him or do away with him for good. They are the film’s primary evil — lurking in the negative space — until they are finally forced to show their hand.

Merle Oberon calls on the sense of camaraderie from each Allied faction to help her find the missing doctor because it’s true that despite the best-laid plans, betrayal is imminent. He is far from safe. They group off to search in all the local back alleys and hellholes.

At this point, Robert Ryan seizes his chance because he’s taken an immediate shining to the French girl Lucienne (not to be confused with the film’s cinematographer Lucien Ballard). It’s amazing to acknowledge approximately 49 minutes into the picture Oberon and Ryan finally get together in what feels like a more traditional Hollywood dynamic with the headliner stars linked romantically. Until this point, however, it’s very much (and very purposefully) a picture by committee.

Ryan for his part is fairly straight-laced and likable, Oberon is principled, and the other blokes add their own touches of good humor or contrarian perspectives. It never feels like a consistent drama and there are whole patches of dialogue broadcasting its intentions too readily. Of course, this has been the cardinal sin of screenwriting since the dawn of time. Closely connected to the storytelling commandment passed down from Billy Wilder: Thou shalt not bore.

But when Tourneur is able to take moments and work them out through dynamic visual means, we get something wholly worthwhile. Even as it’s not always superb storytelling, watching Robert Ryan punch it out in a vat of beer in an abandoned brewery, cloaked in the shadows of noir, is the movie at its very best.

Close behind is when a wounded clown incognito totters onto the stage to uproarious laughter only to topple right on top of the camera as the investigating military police are left to pick up the pieces.

In such moments, it doesn’t matter where it happens or what it means so much as how it is executed for our benefit. We feel the impact. Or later on the train, with a traitor in their ranks, a violent act is perpetrated and implausibly reflected out a train window. Whether it makes total sense, the core of the action is relayed to the audience in such an ingenious fashion.

Then, the movie wraps up with more wry, slightly disdainful commentary about the bombed-out ruins of Berlin as if it’s a sightseeing tour. It runs in tandem with many of the more staged moments promoting a lasting message of goodwill. Alas, it was not to be.

So while the film can never get out of the shadow of propaganda or cast off its noble intentions, for viewers interested in something more timeless, Berlin Express has a handful of genuinely gripping moments belying any bouts of heavy-handedness. It’s relatively easy to latch onto the good and tolerate the rest.

3.5/5 Stars

This Land is Mine (1943): Renoir, Laughton, and O’Hara Take on The Nazis

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This Land in Mine initiates itself as a memorial to WWI. We see a statue with a crouching soldier. It’s inscribed with the following message: “In memory of those who died to bring peace to the world.” In the foreground, the Nazi juggernaut rolls into town. Peace did not last thanks to Hitler’s voracious appetite for “Lebensraum.”

The juxtaposition is key, and it says everything Renoir wants us to know without putting words to it. A newspaper is strewn on the ground with a very prominent headline featuring Hitler’s latest invasion. We’re seeing it firsthand.

There is only the very beginning, and it suggests something elegant about Renoir’s critique of the Nazis. In his case, it doesn’t come in the guise of a thriller like we might see with Fritz Lang or Hitchcock — this fit their own proclivities and doubled as pulse-pounding entertainment.

For Renoir, the story is a drama of a different sort. The local school is run by only a handful of teachers who must do their best to keep the school of rowdy adolescents afloat even with so many outside distractions. Suddenly Plato’s Republic and Voltaire’s writings are deemed dangerous by the new administration.

The school’s beloved Professor Sorrel (Philip Merivale) muses what the Nazis have before them is a delicate operation — cutting out the heart without killing the patient. Put in such terms, it sounds tenuous at best if not doomed to fail. Something must give way and perish.

The movie’s not about force or sheer strength, but the resoluteness and free reign of ideas. Because this is what brings people together and allows them to think for themselves about the true tenants of good and evil.

The two primary teachers are the middle-aged, ever-reticent Albert Lorry (Charles Laughton), who still lives with his mother, and the fiery soon-to-be-engaged Louise Martin (Maureen O’Hara). They are tasked with “correcting” their textbooks, though Ms. Martin’s act of passive rebellion is to hold on to the miscreant pages for the day they can be pasted back in. If all this sounds harrowing and positively medieval, stinking of Fahrenheit 451, that’s because it does.

Still, we live in a modern society of self-censoring. Not of ourselves mind you, but we like to cut out all the pages of the culture and the world with ideas we don’t find palatable or don’t summarily agree with. It’s so much easier to insulate ourselves with things that are innocuous and inoffensive from our own tribe. Then, as a result, we’re left with an ill-fated and potentially disastrous conception of the world.

This is partially what allows tyrants to take over and also what allows bipartisanism to poison people, since they never see the human being sitting across from them. Does it say something that I often feel less proud of my country than ever before? It’s not so much for the historical sins, because I’ve always known them to be there, but it’s for what feels like our current failures. And not just our failures but the persistent callousness and cynicism pervading our world.

Walter Slezak was always a fine performer in a bevy of roles as diverse as they come. Here his Nazi is in the mold of military efficiency; he’s totally pragmatic — just trying to do his duty and get by. He knows from experience he wants no sabotage and no martyrs. Because this churns up emotions and will blow up like a powder keg.

Later, he preaches how the children of today are the soldiers of tomorrow. No one knows that better than the Nazis with their Hitler youth regimen and indoctrination. But with that, you have the muddied center that a man like George Sanders train station manager must contend with. He lacks the idealism of the academics, namely, his fiancee O’Hara, the principled young woman who gathers the children together to sing rousing songs in the air raid shelter while the Allied bombs fall overhead.

You have this rowdy boy’s hall out of Mr. Chips set against the backdrop of an occupied city during wartime. It makes for a strange marriage but not an inauthentic one. Because, as we’ve already suggested, it’s another crucial battleground for the hearts and minds of the next generation. These are life-altering battles to be fought on their behalf, and it’s not solely with guns and bombs.

Since it has not been mentioned already, This Land is Mine is an unofficial reunion of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and not just the same players. It’s an extension of this same sweet but painful romance as reflected by the bashful Laughton. He has feelings for his young colleague — they care for one another — but she is with another.

Mrs. Lory (Una O’Connor) is a demonstrative lady, with deep-seated opinions, but her maternal love knows no bounds, and it’s phenomenal to watch in action. Her son is imprisoned, no fault of his own. In a world of daily paranoia, he’s one of 10 innocents imprisoned in recompense for two German soldiers murdered in the streets by a saboteur. It’s a debilitating moral dilemma for those who know the perpetrator intimately. After all, it is one life weighed against ten others.

It occurs to me that the man who made Le Grande Illusion could not sell his characters short in time of war. The generation changed and brought with it a new enemy — and we’ve toiled with history to make Hitler and his ilk a different kind of evil — but that almost makes it too easy. We can keep them at arm’s length with a clear conscience.

George Sanders says something telling as he commiserates with the town’s mayor. They are both in undesirable positions of power where they either compromise with the powers that be or fall under fiercer tyranny. Their acquiescing is deemed to be spineless. Sanders retorts:

“It’s easy for people in free countries to call us names, but you wait to see how they behave when the Germans march in. They’ll shake hands. Make the best of it.” A lesser film would have made them mere stooges and collaborators. I made the mistake of believing this was all they were. However, although the moral gradient is quite nuanced, it doesn’t mean Renoir doesn’t have a clear preference.

It comes in the form of Albert, a seemingly diffident man who nevertheless evolves when challenges are thrust upon him. Laughton has every opportunity to save himself quite easily, and yet he resolves to stand for an idea with his fallen friends.

When Laughton gets on the stand and talks about the Nazis’ assault on working-class people, making them into slaves pitted against a middle-class afraid of chaos and disorder, it’s very plainly Renoir’s point of view aided by scribe Dudley Nichols. Truth under any form cannot be allowed to live under the occupation. This is what Laughton stands up for because it is far too precious to go down without a fight.

There’s a lot of rousing defiance in the final act, good for stirring up the patriots, but what did it for me was Laughton’s exit. He gets his kiss and is unceremoniously shoved out of his classroom. But he’s a new man pushing the guards away, hands in pockets, perfectly at peace with the moment. His newfound courage is evident to all.

After watching the film, I had to ask myself the question: If this land is mine — the land I call home — why don’t I start acting like it? It’s so easy to cast aspersions on others and quite another thing to take personal responsibility.

4/5 Stars

Oppenheimer (2023)

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Being a history aficionado I pored over American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which provided the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s latest film on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

So many ideas were swirling around my brain when I entered the theater, but the first is obvious and it’s where Nolan begins: In Greek mythology, Prometheus took fire from Zeus, gifted it to humanity, and then was castigated for it.

Obviously, it’s easy to cast Oppenheimer as one of the most important figures of the 20th century since he was the “Father of the Atomic Bomb,” but he was also one of its greatest tragedies. There’s a scale and scope to this narrative woven right into the very fabric of history.

My other thought is a far more intimate detail but equally telling. Although he spent much of his time teaching at Berkeley and Cal Tech, Robert had a deep abiding love for the wide-open New Mexico territory where he kept a ranch and often went horseback riding. It was the first time I realized that Los Alamos and the outpost for the Manhattan Project was not some arbitrary place chosen by the government. It held such deep ties to who he was as a human being and what he held dear.

American Prometheus is a vivid and fascinating historical tome, but one can imagine the difficulties in adapting such a massive work. Nolan comes at it ferociously turning the historical details laid out before him, into something unequivocally cinematic.

A whole movie could be borne on Cillian Murphy’s face and it is. Between his vivid eyes, gaunt contour, the porkpie hat, and pipe, there’s something instantly iconic about him. He’s haunted and profound even before he says or does much of anything.

It’s dizzying watching Nolan develop the rich world around Oppenheimer packed with substance — a real world of real people and events we get to experience firsthand. This immediacy is key and although I’ve read the book, I don’t think you’re required to keep it in your back pocket.

The movie creates a complex constellation of relationships. These include important people in his life personally like Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his future wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) or his intellectual heroes such as Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) living before us. I appreciated how we are thrown into his existence without true introductions or pretense.

He also punctuates the drama with mid to minor cameo parts taken on by notable actors like Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Gary Oldman, and Rami Malek. This punch of celebrity does yeoman’s work in creating recognition in his audience regardless of historical knowledge.

Oppenheimer’s early life comes whizzing by us with so many stimuli and swirling jumps in location and setting that it feels like the cross between a globetrotting action movie and the roaming panoramas of late-period Terrence Malick. Nolan trusts the audience and expects them to pick up the pieces.

What differentiates Nolan’s work from his source material partially comes down to the visual flourishes at his disposal but also the ingrained structure he uses to mold it to his own vision. He effectively creates a narrative tension between fusion and fission as denoted by the alternating scenes of color and black & white framed by the two contrasting hearings.

The director has noted Amadeus (1984) among his reference points for his latest project because it is a character study functioning in a kind of duality. Mozart’s exasperating genius is framed by the point of view of his rival Salieri. Albeit our “Mozart” feels far more sympathetic, and our “Salieri,” well, you must make up your own mind.

Nolan does something narratively brilliant by providing us Strauss’s perspective juxtaposed with our protagonist. Lewis Strauss was a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s government clearance being stripped in 1954.

I read the book and despised Strauss as well as the prosecutor Robb (Jason Clarke) because of what they had done to Oppenheimer. But Nolan for a time strings me along even with this pre-existing knowledge so I begin to empathize and even get inside the interior life of this man. The doubts set in. Perhaps I misconstrued the facts as I remember them. He’s not all bad.

And yet when the vindictive pettiness that was there the whole time comes out again, it was somehow a shock and also an affirmation of everything I thought this man to be. Still, Nolan was able to encapsulate and still obfuscate this strange dynamic between these two men.

Robert Downey Jr. also must be given credit in a role that relies on his acting chops more than his wry charisma. I’m not always a fan of actors aging into roles like this, but I’m sure he’s going to surprise more than a few folks in the audience.

As the movie hurtles toward the apex of the Trinity test with the race against the Nazis at full tilt and Oppenheimer shouldering this massive project alongside General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), we all know innately where we are going. These moments speak for themselves. I wouldn’t dream of trying to distill this suspended moment in time with a few inadequate lines. You must contend with it yourself.

However, with all that happens in Oppenheimer, I’m still trying to figure out if the structure works exactly because we spike with the Trinity test and still must witness the hearings and Oppenheimer’s gradual martyrdom.

It certainly maintains a breakneck pace that kind of overwhelms you in a way that’s never boring. The lengths of scenes, the cross-cutting, and the non-linear jumps through time and space are probably the writer-directors greatest attributes.

Ultimately the meeting between Einstein and Oppenheimer that Strauss only caught the tail-end of becomes a kind of lynchpin moment plucked out of time. In some ways, it does feel like a continuation of Dunkirk and Nolan’s deep commitment to the manipulation of time. Chronologically this is relatively early in the story and yet he somehow builds it to be the beginning of the end exploding into our current modernity.

There they stand on Princeton’s campus together meeting again. Oppenheimer reminds his elder of his biggest fear: That the construction of the bomb would conceivably set off a chain reaction destroying the world.

“What of it?” Einstein asks.

Oppenheimer responds, “I believe we did.”

It’s a sobering ending as nuclear imagery engulfs the screen once more. Because as an audience in the 21st century, we must reckon with a changed future imparted to us by Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Although the atomic bomb didn’t actually blow up the world as some feared, it birthed a reality in the wake of The Cold War and McCarthyism hysteria we are still coming to terms with today.

The film feels more grotesque and shocking than I’m accustomed to in Nolan’s oeuvre or perhaps I just blocked out the grimmer corners of his work. He’s certainly not squeamish about the darkness.

When “Oppie” is beset by a gymnasium full of cheering people and the horrors building up around him or he faces interrogation and his intimate trysts with Jean Tatlock merge and all but play out for everyone to see, I was perplexed, even disturbed. I didn’t want this and I go so far as to say I didn’t need the explicit nature, though Nolan probably has his reasons.

I’m not sure if it can be hailed as his magnum opus, but in some ways, Nolan has done the unthinkable by making a potentially stodgy historical piece into a gripping blockbuster. In the age of superhero movies, studios have mostly assumed historical genres are dead. Likewise, by shaking up a prosaic biopic form, the director alights on something that’s narratively audacious even when it falters.

That’s why he’s remained one of our most beloved filmmakers over the last decades. He makes big movies for thinking people, and if nothing else, I hope Oppenheimer acts as a clarion call for more thoughtful tentpoles in the industry. The audience seems to be more than rewarding his efforts.

4/5 Stars

Double Feature: Apartment for Peggy & Take Care of My Little Girl

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Recently I was appreciating some films starring Jeanne Crain, an alluring actress who was at the height of her popularity during the ’40s and ’50s. Although she was rarely touted as a preeminent actress, I wanted to highlight two films of hers that more than highlight her appeal.

Both Apartment for Peggy and Please Take Care of My Little Girl are set in the context of college in the post-war years. One has Craine as a newlywed wife tracking down student housing and in the latter film she plays a naive college freshman with sorority aspirations.

Read my thoughts on the two films below:

Apartment for Peggy (1948)

Apartment for Peggy is one of those Classic Hollywood films packed with pleasant surprises. The first of them is Edmund Gwenn. He’s best remembered as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. Here he’s directed once more by George Seaton this time playing a listless university professor.

He lives off his pension in his crusty old abode spending his evenings with the same colleagues playing the same music they have for years. However, one evening he quite matter-of-factly announces his aspirations to commit suicide. He’s very rational about it. Still, his doctor won’t give him more than two sleeping pills at a time so he dutifully stores them up for a rainy day.

Then, something else far more momentous happens. He meets a young woman (Jeanne Crain) on a bench. Peggy Taylor motors about 1,000 miles per minute — her mind and conversations leapfrogging all over the place — so her new acquaintance can barely get a word in edgewise. He’s bowled over by her irrepressible zest for life. She’s precisely the person to prickle the professor’s curmudgeonly sensibilities. But she’s also the best equipped to turn Mr. Hypothetical’s life upside down for the better.

Because she tackles just about anything she sets her mind to with this same infectious verve. This is not just the age of the GI Bill (her husband is currently a student), but they are also dealing with a housing crisis. She puts her ear to the ground and manages to scrounge up a space in Pop’s decrepit attic. He’s quite against the imposition and still, Peggy keeps ping-ponging off the walls leaving no room for a rebuttal.

It’s one of many miracles how she spruces up the space and puts it through an astounding transformation. This is just the beginning. With Pop’s begrudging help, she conceives a daytime course for wives and mothers so they can learn about the great philosophers of the modern age (Spinozi included). They want to receive intellectual stimulation on par with their husbands so they can communicate with them.

Pops soon learns his new students are intrinsically driven to learn, and the professor is delighted to serve as their instructor because they seem to intuitively understand his teaching as his most receptive pupils. Their discussions are life-giving. You see already how Peggy single-handedly resurrects the old man so he’s able to see the world with new vim and vigor. Now it’s his turn to return the favor.

William Holden is just about the most innocuous thing about the picture, and that’s not to say he’s bad. Still, this is a picture made by the chemistry of Crain and Gwenn. It acknowledges the generation gap chafing between most any generations with varying perspectives on life with a comic touch. However, any conflict on the part of the elders ultimately engenders mutual affection.

Best of all, it’s a film about ideals and worthwhile pragmatism where the merits of both are made evident. But then again, film is not so much a science as it is a philosophy, an art — concerned with humanities — and the film works in this manner.

It gives off the appearance of a light, inoffensive comedy as we conceive would exist in post-war America. There are many. Certainly, this is true. However, it also sheens with warmth and goodness. Seeing the movie multiple times, the appeal of its brand of geniality just continues to bloom.

3.5/5 Stars

Take Care of My Little Girl (1951)

Sorority movies certainly feel like they’re solely made to meet an audience demand as a convenient cash grab. Take Care of My Little Girl wasn’t the first picture in this genre as I can think of at least a couple predecessors like Sorority House and These Glamour Girls (1939).

However, this movie actually had its origins in the master’s thesis of Peggy Goodin, who eventually turned her research into a novel. She was particularly concerned with how racial and religious discrimination played out in the highly moderated spaces of college sororities. To be clear, 20th Century Fox’s adaptation excises all of this commentary by casting their stable of homogenous Hollywood starlets (Jeanne Crain, Jean Peters, Mitzi Gaynor, Betty Lynn et al.) and a couple of male heartthrobs.

And yet that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t come with any teeth. For its day, it was actually rather controversial if only for its forthright portrayal of the social politics and hazing rituals that have continued to go under scrutiny generations later. The film looks different and yet at its core, it speaks to the very same issues we see today.

Jeanne Crain has such a radiant poise, it’s so easy to like her and not only like her but admire her for how she cares about others. Because she’s a shoo-in as a legacy at Tri-U sorority. Just as importantly, she’s probably the prettiest girl on campus. Not even the resident mean girl Dallas (Peters) can blackball her.

Liz cares deeply for her friends and isn’t totally swayed by the popularity contests even as she strives to make a good impression. She strikes up a rapport with a slightly cynical G.I.-turned-student (Dale Robertson), who helps advise her on classes and thrumbs his nose at the establishment after everything he’s been through. He recognizes something different in her that he likes.

Still, she’s not totally impregnable. Like any young person, she wants to be well-liked helping the class flirt (Jefferey Hunter) with the answers to his French exam. This in turn leads to being pinned. She’s the talk of the sorority house. And yet she’s not easy to categorize.

The picture is surprisingly poignant and perceptive. It’s not some hyperdramatic, superficial portrait of college life even if it’s playing to a specific audience. Also, thanks in part to Crain, there’s a genuine candor to the picture and a visible evolution to this young woman.

It may not be a lot, but it’s something. We do see her change as a human being. Surely college life looks so different now 70 years on from what we’re used to, and yet there are elements that have not changed. We still have fraternities and sororities and social hierarchies. I was aghast to realize even bluebooks have been around for well nigh a century!

This movie doesn’t necessarily suggest these institutions are inherently bad. However, sometimes we believe that tradition is good only because it’s the way things have always been done. But there should be better reasons. There need to be dissenters and people to challenge the status quo. There need to be brave folks who are willing to do what is right compared to what is easy. People who are loyal to their friends rather than simply playing the games for want of status and approval.

Even if the Epstein Brothers’ script forgoes some of the most intriguing aspects of the original story, I appreciate that they explore their topic with something a little bit more involved than superficial exploitation. It actually strives to be about something, however small.

3.5/5 Stars

Il Generale Della Rovere (1959): Vittorio De Sica and Robert Rossellini

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It occurs to me, like with Jean-Pierre Melville (and so many others), that the landscape and context of the war years left such a lasting impact on Robert Rossellini, and they are made manifest in his films. Although it’s shot over a decade later, there’s still a lived-in quality, committed to a kind of authenticity.

Whereas others, namely Americans, experienced the war and then returned home (albeit with PTSD), for these men war was a stipulation of everyday life. It was the water they drank and the bread they ate, suffusing into all aspects of society.

Vittorio De Sica is called upon to play a far different kind of gambler than he was in The Gold of Naples. His blustering lunatic is displaced by a miserable loser stumbling and bumbling his way through a mediocre existence.

Emmanuele Bardone, like everyone else, is getting trampled on by this war, just trying to survive. His debts pile up, no thanks to his rampant gambling habits. He pleads with his girlfriend, a fair-weather beauty (Sandra Milo), who has had just about enough of the meager life he can offer her on his half-baked promises. It’s to no avail. She’s not intent on bailing him out again.

Thus, he must find other means to scrounge up the funds to pay off a German Sergeant Major. They’re buddy-buddy — gambling acquaintances — but it doesn’t keep them from attempting to stab each other in the back. It’s one of those uneasy partnerships engendered by the war. Because Bardone is such a man: feckless, unctuous, self-serving. He’s always looking to get ahead, whether by courting Nazis or fellow Italians frantic to track down missing relatives at any cost…specifically well-off Italians.

Physically, Vittorio De Sica strikes me as a man whose stature and features are impressive, quite effortlessly handsome. Yet, he’s capable of bringing something out of them, wringing the comedy and the tragedy with the body God has given him.

I don’t know why exactly, but I want to compare him to Cary Grant — a man who doesn’t take himself too seriously — so whether debonair or a bit of a cad, we still find it within our hearts to root for him.

He vows to help a rich widow and her daughter-in-law in what feels like just another confidence game preying on their desperation. His gambling gets interrupted by air raids, and he crawls back into the life of one of his other girlfriends (Giovanna Ralli).

Something else happens that he knows absolutely nothing about, but it changes the course of the entire picture. A famed dissident is accidentally shot dead at a roadblock, but a cover-up ensues. The capture of Generale Della Rovere is spread around town despite a botched assignment within the Nazi ranks. Now they must find a man to fill his place: Bardone is fingered for it, and he has no bargaining power in this economy.

We’re privy to the Nazi’s intricate filing systems and notecard records helping to mechanize their ruthless war machine, but they’re also more than prepared to play spy and counterspy with a sorry drifter’s carcass.

Narrative-wise it feels like the story can easily be split into two distinct segments. Because it takes a good hour before De Sica is actually cast as the Generale and suddenly the stakes of his new life are raised.

This film was one of Rossellini’s more profitable efforts and with it came an actual high-concept idea. But this never feels like what the director is truly interested in. He skirts around the “plot” as much as possible to make this story about a character and a world.

When he is finally in prison, all the rebels and convicted patriots pledge their services through cell windows and the surrounding walls. They believe him to be who he says he is…meanwhile, Bardone maintains his pact with Colonel Muller to coax out the Generale’s contact on the inside. He’s met with a crisis calling for some self-examination.

Aside from De Sica, Hannes Messemer has to be the other obvious standout as the German SS man. He’s hard and difficult to like, especially when wearing a Nazi uniform in wartime. However, he’s not a cartoon and even momentarily there are these ever so faint flashes of nobility. He cannot be pinned down; his duty as a military officer trumps everything, and yet the contours of his person make us grapple with more than we are used to in a Nazi.

Because as much as we don’t want to admit it, every Nazi was a human being. He is another soldier, driven by duty, perhaps an ideology, and yet still complicit in these grievous sins against humanity.

There’s also what feels like a level of moralizing to the picture. Because we have this space created. It is now the 1950s. Suddenly Rossellini is out from under the complete specter of the war, and he’s able to make his hapless vagabond into an unsolicited hero. A cynic could brand it as little better than a post-war potboiler.

And yet as he tramps out into the snowy prison yard, there’s a steely conviction about him for the first time in the movie. It takes the obvious arc of this character and imbues it with something fleetingly profound. Surely this is the sensibility of Rossellini.

I recall Lino Ventura in Army of Shadows, Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored, and now  Vittorio De Sica. They all share something in common. They were valiant heroes to the end and sometimes their heroism is unwonted. It doesn’t matter so much the road you’ve taken as long as you make it there in the end. There was never any doubt.

4/5 Stars

Germany Year Zero (1948)

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Roberto Rossellini famously dedicated Germany Year Zero to the memory of his son Romano. After such personal forays into Italy’s own tumultuous relationship with the war years in Rome Open City and then the interwoven portraiture of Paisan, the final picture in the trilogy feels a bit like an outlier.

And yet in connecting his own recent tragedy with the hopelessness of the German experience, it does feel like he’s alighted on something that feels personal and honest. At the very least providing emotional truth if not always point-for-point docudrama.

The premise is very simple even childishly so staying with the neorealist attitude. Edmund (Edmund Moeschke) is a little boy scrounging around for work, sustenance, and anything else that might be of use to his family in the rubble of the bombed-out nation. It begins feeling out the world, not settling in on one story as much as the mood and milieu of the times. Because it is a very particular moment.

There’s a sense that the film is on the ground floor of something. Since The Thousand Year Reich terminated prematurely, it becomes an unprecedented moment in history — a time to rebuild and put their world back together again — although the day-to-day struggle remains real. You get bits and pieces in The Third Man or The Search and A Foreign Affair, but Germany Year Zero feels like a different perspective on the same events. 

It’s an important film for the sake of challenging our perceptions. Not exactly in the same way as Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer, and yet it’s about empathy and upending our assumptions. We see the common markers of humanity laid before us.

Edmund returns home to his family in an apartment complex running perilously over on their bills. His older brother Karl-Heinz (Franz-Otto Krüger) is fraught with turmoil over turning himself into the authorities due to his military past. His invalid father (Ernst Pittschau) is a principled man, but in such dire times, his weakness feels like a familial curse. Eva (Ingetraud Hinze) becomes the maternal figure in the house, and after caring for her father, she spends the nights accompanying foreigners for the evening…

With the spiking black market prices, the Kohler’s are just trying to eke by a living. This is not the way people were meant to live, and it’s a misnomer that the war has a finite end. The repercussions of WWII on Germany continue long after the surrender sounded.

The viewpoint of a boy is, in one sense, youthful and resilient but also impressionable and malleable, shaped by all the people and things he comes in contact with. These are the most formative days of his life thus far.

Edmund takes up the company of other street vultures as they scavenge for survival, some stolen potatoes here, some fake soap there for duping unsuspecting victims. Kohler is callow, but he soon learns this pack mentality through how his friends model certain behaviors.

His former teacher has a charming manner and a dubious reputation, while he uses his former pupils to peddle goods on the black market, espousing a philosophy of survival of the fittest. He’s either a closeted supporter of the Führer and if not him, then Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s this kind of pernicious ideology leading to ungodly Holocaust.

Edmund returns home to the scolding of his sister and with his father’s health being far worse. He’s vitamin deficient and needs a hospital though they’re overflowing as is. The elder Mr. Kohler bemoans the fact that like many in his generation, he wasn’t bolder — seeing the calamity of Hitler, and doing something to stem the tide (“We saw the disaster coming and did nothing to prevent it”).

Germany Year Zero also exhibits a cynical side and not just in the satirical way of Billy Wilder. This feels like real tragedy before us without the happy ignorance of glutted Allies come to vindicate the Germans from their sinful past. There’s no comparison between their lives. It seems indecent to even try and equate the two.

Some might note that the film is not true neorealism, with interiors shot outside of Germany, nor can you very easily call it purely “Italian” neorealism for obvious geographical reasons. Somehow this rarely pulls us out of the experience.

There’s this underlying sense that very little performance is going on in Germany Year Zero. Because these are not actors. They are merely people, and there is a confident sense that almost every strewn rock or portrait of degradation is not set dressing, but something with a natural story all its own we may never know.

We get one final glimpse of the rubble-filled streets, a train cutting through the foreground as a woman’s form kneels in front of the desolate backdrop of total annihilation. It feels like a canvas — the woman an image of the Pieta — with Rossellini crying out into the bleakness of the world. Suddenly, we realize why this movie was dedicated to his son.

It’s no wonder Germany Year Zero was hardly a popular attraction in its day; it’s not a crowd-pleaser. But with the gracious gift of time, we can look at it as a crucial counterpoint. For those back home in the U.S., these were the best years, full of prosperity and endless possibility. At ground zero, it felt very much like the pit of despair, and there were no easy fixes. They have to rebuild from the bottom up. One must beg the question, does mass catastrophe occur at the end or at the beginning of an era? Perhaps it’s both.

4/5 Stars

Paisan (1946)

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“Paisan” feels like a ubiquitous term. At the very least, it seems to have entered into a shared vernacular most Americans understand. And of course, this is part of the reason Roberto Rosselini’s follow-up to Rome Open City employs the word.

His newfound audience would be able to appreciate its very simple meaning with some amount of recognition. But it hardly seems like a ploy because it illustrates the core themes of the picture. And this is not done through an epic narrative stretched out over a couple hours time. It is built out of these mini-scenarios coming to represent a breadth of WWII experience between Italians and Americans.

We open in 1943 in Sicily with a group of American soldiers making their way through the villages for recon. As has a habit of happening in these cross-cultural pictures, the English language sounds like tin to the ear, but when they meet our first Italian characters and the dialogue is interspersed, we immediately get something richer and more intriguing because we have both languages dancing off one another and fighting for some primacy over the scenes.

Much of the movie is negotiated in these spaces in-between what is understood and what must be inferred and left only to the imagination. The benefit of subtitles gives us a privileged position, but not all of these characters have the same luxury.

Even when one soldier is called upon to keep watch over their guide in the caves — a young Italian girl looking for her family — we settle on something so basic. It’s their lack of communication and it can invoke fear and conflict, but it can also remind us of our most basic commonalities.

Conversation about cows and milk progress as the soldier reminisces about his family back home in photos. This pleasant interchange is really only a momentary flame, quickly snuffed out. Because we are reminded there is a war at hand and conflict comes from the outside and kills their moment together.

Before we are left to dwell too much on the present, we march ever onward toward Naples. Here is a tale we might see from De Sica and later in Germany Year Zero. It’s a story of youthful vagrants — one named Pasquale — who lives on the streets buzzing around G.I.s like a misquito looking to suck them dry out of pure necessity. It’s an extraordinary scene to watch the young boy latch onto a drunken black MP (Dots Johnson).

Their saga drags them all across town and, again, they hold two-sided conversations that are totally at odds with one another. As they sit on a pile of rumble together, it strikes me how this little boy sees the man for what he has. Yes, he’s black, but he’s American, and what a privilege that is. He runs off with his boots with a kind of fatalistic inevitability and that could be the end of it.

Instead, they meet again in another chance encounter. The soldier seeks restitution and yet Joe’s attempt to get back his stolen property feels almost inconsequential when he recognizes the desolation around him. This disparity is especially complicated when you put it next to the hypocrisy of racial discrimination back home.

He represents wealth and prosperity and still must feel some relegation to second-class citizenship in his own right. In 1946 Harry Truman had yet to integrate the military and, at best, even this felt like a symbolic victory at best.

The way Paisan links together these individual studies in character and relationship means the movie offers up this extraordinary breadth while still maintaining a hypersensitive level of intimacy. Because it takes a single interaction between disparate people and allows them to play out in such a way they come to represent something so much broader.

Later, it’s June, 1944. There’s a voice in the darkness shouting about American cigarettes ready to smoke. Glen Miller’s “In The Mood” is instant shorthand, and it coincides with a dance hall packed with folks. This is a new Rome from the one in Rosselini’s original film, until the military police soon shake up the joint and send the locals into a tizzy.

A fugitive in furs (Maria Michi) evades the authorities and picks up a soldier boy (Gar Moore) on the street over cigarettes. Remember, this is the era of Now Voyager and Bogey and Bacall. They are the cultural tastemakers. It’s a portrait of how even a short span of time — 6 months — can change people drastically, where the hopeful optimism and jubilation of the liberation can quickly be displaced with rowdy opportunism and disillusionment. And with it, a final reunion is precluded in a turn of events that might as well be anticipating the wistful fates of Jacques Demy over 15 years later.

The movie continues in Florence along the Arno River. Here a young Allied nurse (Harriet Medin), who knows the area intimately from time abroad, sets off on a singular mission to find an artisan friend, who is currently in the midst of the local skirmishes. The streets are full of firefights playing out in unsentimental terms.

In one way it feels ludicrous watching this woman and a fellow searcher streaking through the treacherous zones of no-man’s-land, and yet we cannot turn away. In a Hitchcock movie, we might term the arbitrary goal they are pursuing the Macguffin. It makes no difference.

I’ve come to realize that Italian Neorealism has come to signify a kind of emotional truth paired with authentic visuals. It’s not documentary, but it takes the layers and contours of the real world to tell what feels like mini tragedies wrapped up in these individual segments.

Paisan keeps on offering up these nuggets that intrigue me. I think of the next story, which feels like a more peaceful, mundane tale about three American chaplains who rest at the local monastery. There’s so much benevolence even as we are reminded the vocation they follow is unified the world over.

One of the visitors tells his peer, “I think one can really be at peace with the Lord without removing themselves from the world. After all, it was created for us. The world is our parish.” These words feel like they come straight from Martin Luther, a man who looked to democratize the Christian faith and break any vocational dichotomies.

Sure enough, he’s a Protestant and another man is a Jew. This revelation causes a wave of worry to come over the local Holy Men. Surely these guests are lost. They have not found the path because their beliefs are marred by inaccuracies and flaws (possibly even heresy). Rather than digging into this spiritual discourse, it settles for a kind of moral stability, not quite an inclusive gospel but certainly a call for tolerance and appreciation across the religious ranks.

In the final chapter, Italian Partisans and American OSS fight a desperate guerilla war against the impending Germans. It’s not a chapter of history we consider in detail, but we are placed in the moment so we forcibly comprehend the exhausting futility of their tactical battles. They live day to day constantly striving to stay out of reach of a tireless enemy. The only thing keeping them alive is their fierce camaraderie. They fight for something larger than themselves.

The ending of Paisan is matter-of-fact even as the imagery is bleak, and it feels like a callback to the opening story. We are reminded of the utter inhumanity of war, but Paisan was obviously meant to be used as a tool of mutual healing between the U.S. and Italy. Because it’s the humanity bleeding out of the movie coming to the fore, more than any amount of tragedy.

4.5/5 Stars

Christmas in Connecticut (1945): Yuletide Cheer and The War’s End is Here

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Christmas in Connecticut functions as a fine way to cap off 1945, a year full of jubilation and relief for the American public. The war was finally over! Given this context, the setup might feel familiar. A sailor who was shipwrecked out at sea in the Pacific was rescued. Now he’s seeing the war from the sidelines in a hospital.

Because in the mind of the viewer the war is already won, it feels like a relief. Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) is an American hero, and all he has to worry about are building his strength and getting to know the pretty southern belle nursing him back to full health. Still, with the holidays approaching, he can’t help yearning for a little bit of good old-fashioned Americana, the down-home comfort and hospitality he’s missed out on overseas.

A letter of request gets sent on his behalf and the old battle-ax, famed magazine publisher, Alexander Yardley (Sydney Greenstreet) catches wind of it. The idea is to serve up the soldier a meal in the home of famed columnist Elizabeth Lane, known for her idyllic farm, snow-covered nostalgia, and domestic tips and tricks. (The character was based on real-life Gladys Taber of Family Circle Magazine who actually lived on a farm in Connecticut)

As he could use a bit of comfort and home cooking himself, Yardley thinks it’s a fine suggestion, and he’s prepared to invite himself and the soldier out to the country for the holidays. He has no thought that it might be an inconvenience.

But of course, this is hardly the problem. It’s worse than that. Elizabeth Lane does not exist, at least not as vividly as she does on the pages of Yardley’s magazine captivating nationwide audiences coast to coast.

In truth, she lives in a drafty apartment overlooking the outside laundry as she knocks away at her typewriter eating sardines for breakfast. Because she’s no cook nor a wife with a baby and a farm. She’s more of a city girl living off a diet of independence and mink coats. Of course, no one knows about the sham aside from her and her editor.

What makes it worse is the fact Mr. Yardley is a very principled fellow and a stickler for printing the truth. If he ever caught wind of this charade, it would be the end. So to take stock of the damage, her boss is about to show up on her doorstep (one which she doesn’t have) for Christmas eve with an unwitting soldier who believes in what she comes to represent.

Barbara Stanwyck dons this kind of part with ease as the street-wise lifestyle columnist. She rides out the comedy with her usual aplomb, but she can play romance and the sentimental in a manner that doesn’t totally rob them of their import.

Men vying for her affection will be an ongoing theme throughout the picture and why not because Barbara Stanwyck is the picture of self-confident beauty with an undisputed vivacity.

The film is salvaged — from solely a narrative perspective — when she impulsively accepts the routine marriage proposal from her suitor, the wealthy businessman John Sloan. He’s been trying to get her hand in marriage for a time. This time she acquiesces and accepts. Might as well have some stability.

However, it’s also the decision leading the shambles around her to all slide into place. It gets to the point where they might have a fighting chance making the impression stick at least for a weekend. John will be her husband because he is, isn’t he? They’ll conveniently use his farm. Check. Uncle Felix (S.Z. Sakall) will come along to cook the meals. Now there’s just the issue of the baby…

They assemble everything to make a go at the charade. They call out a judge to perform the marriage before their arrivals show up. There’s one hitch. Jefferson shows up early! It’s a scramble to pull everything together but the game is on whether they like it or not!

Morgan is an old star I always find to be a bit blah if generally genial. Thankfully, the film is replete with a formidable supporting cast to round out the holiday household. Not least among them Sydney Greenstreet (in a rather uncharacteristic role), then S.Z. Sakall, and Una O’Connor.

Felix and Norah go to war in the kitchen with their equally pertinacious attitudes. After all, Sakall is the king of the kitchen and catastrophe while subsequently becoming the film’s most lovable secret weapon when the story gets convoluted and a savior is called to bring it back around.

The many scenarios are easy to list off: bathing the baby with company on hand, flipping flap jacks at the behest of Mr. Yardley, putting the cow to bed, and the most calamitous of all, the baby swallowing a watch! It’s the actual unraveling of the scenes which become most delightful because Stanwyck rides them out with her typical flair for situational comedy.

A major turning point comes at a festive dance where love blooms though it does give a strange impression to outsiders looking in. The “married” Mrs. Sloan looks to have taken a shining for the tall man in uniform and the feelings are mutual. But that’s quite out of the question. Think of the scandal. This would never do totally dousing the prevailing happiness brought on by the cessation of war.

Still, they take a magical sleigh ride together. Because one of them knows they are unattached and Morgan’s character is just naive and self-effacing enough for us to believe he would never have presumptuous intentions.

However, everything must come to a head as this is tantamount to Murphy’s law in cinema. In this movie, it’s thanks to a miscommunication and a kidnapped baby. One of the highlights of the movie is observing the subtle antagonism of Sakall toward Greenstreet. He mutters “Fat Man” which might be a fairly blatant reference to his incorrigible part in The Maltese Falcon.

However, they also go at it in the kitchen because Sakall is the glue and the matchmaker — everything required to hold the story together and see it to the desired ending. It means stopping Yardley in his tracks. In fact, these scenes are only topped by Stanwyck laying into the Fat Man of her own accord and then falling for Dennis Morgan as it’s meant to be. They really are 1 and 2 on the film’s list of greatest attractions.

In a movie such as this with snow, sleighs, a warm hearth, and friends and family, not to mention the end of WWII, what would the ending be without our protagonists wrapped up in each other’s arms? If you’re like wartime audiences with generous spirits, it’s excusable to find Christmas in Connecticut to be agreeable holiday entertainment as the mood strikes you.

3.5/5 Stars

The Young Lions (1958): Humanity in Epic Scale

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The opening of Edward Dmytryk’s The Young Lions, based on Irvin Shaw’s titular novel, could be plucked out of an earlier picture like The Mortal Storm. It’s New Year’s Eve 1938 in Bavaria, Germany. Young lovers ski and frolic in the snow as locals make merry indoors.

Marlon Brando is a sympathetic German or closer still a principled man named Christian, currently sharing the company of a beautiful American — one Margaret Freemantle (Barbara Rush). For her, the evening is quashed with the word of Hitler. However misguided it might be, he has a genuine optimism about what Hitler can and will do for his country. Christian is not a monster. Likewise, he believes if lives have to be sacrificed for the sake of peace, he will gladly go to war.

Although these two people will never share the screen again, this is the beginning of everything. Because of course, we know what happened next in the history books. War did come. First in Europe, making its way to France, then Britain, and finally, the U.S. got involved. Christian gets his start policing the streets of France, upending their derogatory view of the enemy, even as he struggles with the perils of radical ideology.

It occurs to me, part of Brando’s success comes with how his social consciousness paired with his acting prowess. Because when he still seemed thoroughly engaged with his career, he sought out parts of such diversity, bringing humanity to all sorts of disparate people. They didn’t always hit the mark (I think of Viva Zapata and Tea House of The August Moon), and yet during this same period, he played an informant, a southern ace who falls for a Japanese girl, and here a sympathetic German during WWII.

There’s a calculated empathy to the adaptation, casting a German and a Jewish man as two of our most prominent protagonists. It’s difficult to begrudge The Young Lions its inclinations because they seem genuine and earnest, especially in the capable hands of Brando and Montgomery Clift. Yes, we must take a moment to mention Clift now.

The older actor is sometimes clumped with Brando, but even in the context of this movie, it’s fascinating to begin comparing them. Brando burst onto the scene and ultimately let himself go — becoming disinterested and disaffected by his screen career. Clift, likewise, was an incandescent talent transplanted from the stage, but he was totally engaged in his craft.

His own setbacks were initially out of his control: a car accident that left him dependent on drink and pain killers. He considered Brando a squandered talent for all of his abilities, but if anything, it shows how devoted Clift was to his art, doubling his efforts even after his injury.

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While they’re not exactly “young” lions, Dean Martin and Clift are a pair of compelling ones as they are drafted to be sent out overseas. You would never think of putting them together. Their personalities seem so adverse to one another, and yet there is a component of loyalty found in their performances bleeding out into real life. They were there for each other, forged by fire as they were.

Dean Martin was two years removed from his split with Jerry Lewis, and The Young Lions was his first big chance to redefine his image as an actor. He gives it a valiant go in a performance that maintains shades of his persona. In this case, Michael is a stage entertainer hesitant about going off to war and looking to dodge culpability any way he possibly can. He jousts with his girlfriend Margaret (Rush), who simultaneously doesn’t want him to die even as she disapproves of his dereliction of duty. When the time comes, he proves his mettle and his steadfastness.

Maximillian Schell was a revelation to me quite a number of years ago when I first saw Judgement at Nuremberg. Because in a picture with such contentious stakes and with so many prominent acting powerhouses, for me, he is the film’s standout with the most spectacular stand. In The Young Lions, he plays Brando’s superior espousing the typical rhetoric: The German army is invincible because it obeys orders and it harbors no sentimentality, moralists, or individualists.

In one sense, he constantly castigates Christian for his lapses in judgment, for this softness he has, but for all his perniciousness, Captain Hardenberg still comes off as a human being.  He has a flirtatious wife (May Britt) waiting back home and a life ultimately crippled by injury. If Martin holds his own up against Clift, then Schell — learning his lines phonetically no less — certainly proves himself a compelling presence opposite Brando.

They get reassigned to Rommel’s Afrika Corps in North Africa working behind enemy lines. It’s in these moments, in particular, as they bomb and mow down their unsuspecting enemy, we get a gutting portrait of how merciless the world can be, but that lets people off the hook too easily.

Human beings — myself included — can be petty, mean-spirited, and cruel to one another, and The Young Lions is not only about this global scale of war between nations. It’s about the conflicts and schisms formed in what’s supposed to be a united front — a shared cultural identity. Whether it’s a German with a heart and soul or a Jewish man who is ridiculed and discriminated against in his own country for something that is out of his control.

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The onslaught of Allied forces sweeping across North Africa — the Brits with their bagpipes and Patton with his tanks — is a force to be reckoned with even as the homefront is ripe with the division. Even as Noah (Clift) finds himself a lovely small-town girl (Hope Lange) to wed, the systematic bigotry of his barracks-mates and his superior officer is crippling. He faces it with a lion-hearted resolve as Michael does his best to back him up.

The tide of the war finds Brando and Schell fleeing on a motorcycle to escape the steadily advancing enemy forces. Christian eventually loses his commander and must face the man’s wife with a renewed disillusionment. Even a return to Paris and greetings from old friends (Parley Baer and Liliane Montevecchi), show him the world has changed dramatically. He has as well.

On the Allied front, Michael finally asks to be sent to Normandy, and there reunites with Ackerman to liberate a concentration camp. It is the same camp that has opened Christian’s eyes about what the Germans have been perpetrating for the past 5 years under the guise of Nazism. While not a totally graphic scene, it’s no less of a gut punch as each character is forced to meditate on what is before them.

There’s this driving sense of fate as The Young Lions mounts to highlight one of the monumental absurdities of war. Here we have spent an entire film — through all its peaks and valleys, heartbreaks and reveries — and we finally bring together our three primary leads.

They are on opposites sides of the conflict though they are all men of a certain stock and decency. And yet because of war and how factions are aligned, they are meant to kill one another. They will never have a chance to sit down at a table together and know how similar they really were. This is the great tragedy The Young Lions underlines.

Not only does it exhume the hidden evils of the human heart, but it also annihilates all sense of common humanity, forcing us to only see a demonized enemy opposed to men and women who are not unlike ourselves.

In a better world or even in a world before the war, these three men could have been friends or compatriots. Alas, it was never to be and what’s crueler still, they will never know what they have missed out on. They already have so many traumas; it’s difficult to discern if these thoughts will plague them. But that is not the purpose. The film is constructed in such a way, it’s meant to commend us to cast off war altogether and this is far more telling.

The impression I am left with has magnitude. It’s a minor miracle how the grandiose scale of a cinemascope epic, backed by performances from such renowned talents, somehow still manages an immediacy and intimacy. The Young Lions might be lengthy, but it never loses its protagonists in a mass of humanity. Instead, it highlights the humanity of a few to illuminate a whole society.

4/5 Stars

“The young lions lack and suffer hunger; but those who seek the LORD shall not lack any good thing.”