Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Wooden Crosses / Les Croix de Bois / France / 1932

Wooden Crosses never seems as dated as Bernard’s later, five-hour adaptation of Les Misérables. With that film, as a viewer you need to indulge it a little, excuse the weaknesses and heavy-handedness that mark it as a product of its time. Wooden Crosses is an entirely different case – this French version of All Quiet on the Western Front still stands up as a superb piece of filmmaking. The Criterion/Eclipse blurb talks of the story marking the transformation in these First World War soldiers from blind patriotism to disillusionment, but this isn’t quite the case. True, a brief documentary-style prologue does refer to the extraordinary enthusiasm and patriotism with which the French greeted the outbreak of war, but right from the first scene of the story — when the audience-surrogate, the middle-class Demarchy, arrives at the front — the mood in the film’s portrayal of the war and the opinions expressed by the soldiers is one of gritty sardonic cynicism. It’s a film of filth, mud, cacophonous noise, confusion, casual and meaningless death, which Bernard orchestrates into a series of set-pieces (for example, an extended battle in a graveyard) with the stress on ensemble performance — the soldiers as a group rather than highlighting the story of Demarchy. Two sequences stand out as indicative of what Bernard is attempting in Wooden Crosses. In one, the battle-weary soldiers are ordered by their general to turn out for a victory parade and we see in the one shot the march past of the soldiers and at the same time the even greater number of their dead comrades superimposed in a march above their heads. This is the more conventionally anti-war aspect of the film, mourning the enormous loss of life that was involved. But even more striking is a longer, earlier sequence when the soldiers are stationed at the front and realise the Germans are tunnelling underneath them to lay a bomb — and realise that if their luck holds, they’ll be relieved at their post before the enemy blows it up. So, they count off the hours and then the minutes to the thud of the tunnelling below — a scene that wonderfully portrays the dull tedium of the soldiers’ lives as they await their possible death, their lack of control over their own fates, their submission to a callous officer class, and the way their survival rests on luck and chance.

by Ian Johnston | Source: Eclipse Series 4 DVD
20 Sep 2007 12:04 PM | Submit Comment