El puente

When I saw in news accounts the lovely yet fearful face of a 16 year-old, who had defected from the Taliban during the campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of the 9/11, I was taken back to Bernhard Wicki's Die Brücke (The Bridge), to the faces of young German boys who were recruited by the Nazis to defend a "last" bridgehead, in the final days of World War II in Europe. In both cases, young "true believers" were used as cannon fodder by cynical adults in their futile power games, which they had disguised as moral crusades.

A tiny band of boys, holding weapons as big as they, their bodies and faces still soft and fresh and tight, facing the juggernaut of tanks and artillery and machine guns which we know will soon tear them to pieces. And for what? An ideal?

I suspect that The Bridge was the basis for the Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn vehicle, "Taps". However, The Bridge is the starker and more brutal treatment because, unlike the what-if story of Taps, the what-if does not apply to The Bridge. In fact, throughout history, the use of children in furtherance of warfare has a sickening frequency, the earliest I know of being the Children's Crusade, and now we have the Tamil Tigers (little girls with lockets of cyanide vials) and Palestinian boy bombs.

The Bridge deserves to be revived and shown to as wide an audience as possible in this Dastardly New World we live in.

I lived through that time, I was seventeen, and I know fourteen year olds were fighting to the last " boy ". The realism of this film still takes me back to '45. It happened that way.

A couple of days before the end of World War II, seven sixteen year-old German boys of a small village are recruited for military service. The idealistic Hans Scholten (Folker Bohnet), Albert Mutz (Fritz Wepper), Walter Forst (Michael Hinz), Jurgen Borchert (Frank Glaubrecht), Karl Horber (Karl Michael Balzer), Klaus Hager (Volker Lechtenbrink) and Sigi Bernhard (Günther Hoffmann) join the army on 26 April 1945 with great expectations and enthusiasm to defend their motherland Germany in the front against the will of their parents. Their English teacher Stern (Wolfgang Stumpf) unsuccessfully tries to convince Commander Fröhlich (Heinz Spitzner) to refuse the enlistment of the youngsters. After one day training, the soldiers are summoned to the front but the Commander of the 463rd Battalion of the 3rd Company assigns Sergeant Heilmann (Günter Pfitzmann) to stay with the rookies "protecting" a useless bridge in their village in order to spare the boys. However, in the chaos of the imminent defeat with German soldiers fleeing from the American troops, Heilmann is murdered and the boys defend the small bridge with their lives on 27 April 1945.

"Die Brücke" is another powerful and impressive German film about coming of age in times or war. This anti-war movie probably reflects the thoughts of the brain-washed youngsters by the Nazi ideology and propaganda in the 40's and is heartbreaking to see sixteen year-old boys playing war like a game and without awareness of the seriousness of the situation. Being a father, it is also very sad to see the powerless widows and mothers trying to protect their enthusiastic sons that want to fight to defend their country. The realism of this dramatic movie is awesome and totally different from the approach of Hollywood movies, where Germans are usually evil soldiers and the situation of the civilian population is forgotten, but unfortunately it has not been released in Brazil on VHS or DVD. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): Not Available

German war drama from Deutsche Film Hansa and director Bernhard Wicki. In the waning days of WW2, a group of German high school friends all get drafted into the army, much to their excitement. However, with literally only a single day's worth of training, they are sent to their hometown to guard a small bridge until it can be destroyed by a demolition crew. The young men take their task very seriously, leading to tragic results

The 100 minutes film spends the first hour establishing the characters of each of the young men, so that the frenetic last act becomes even more devastating, as these are fully fleshed out individuals instead of the too-frequent ciphers and cliches found in many war films. The tone is distinctly anti-war, but the movie is never preachy, and the futility of their actions is made apparent naturally, without contrivance. The filmmaking in the final stretch of the film is ahead of its time in the use of rapid edits, traveling camera shots, and zooms. The movie was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (it lost to Black Orpheus). Recommended.

We were shown this movie at school, so I always remembered it as a politically correct piece educational film - which it is, in a way. This is film with a clear purpose. It wants you to learn something. The amazing thing is that it is also a good film. Its message "War Is Bad" is brought across not so much by showing blood, death and destruction but by the means of classical tragedy: There are no "bad guys" in this film; on the contrary, most people try to do good, be humane. (E.g. the boys are told to guard the bridge in order to keep them away from the front.) But what they do results in disaster, because the evil is war itself.