All'est si muore

This was kind of a drill for "Die Brücke", the masterpiece coming some 4 years later. Several young boys have volunteered to fight with the remains of the German Army on the Eastern Front and their mothers take on a desperate journey to get them back home. This is told in black and white, with only small doses of softening and taking stand for the German cause, basically a human drama of motherly uncompromising love, officers and generals torn between duty and human common sense and boys, who feel like deserters, if they would be forced to be boys again. And also a little love story between of the widowed mothers and an Officer. Everything is there, dominating performances by Therese Giehse and Bernhard Wicki, but just a warm-up for the much more focused and uncompromising Masterpiece to follow.

This engaging movie is a mixed bag. There is the seed of a great movie to be made in this patchy one. The intriguing story of six women heading to the Russian front to rescue their teenage sons, who've run away from school to enlist for the Fatherland, deserves better telling. Some fine performances are mixed with some pretty dreadful ones. Some great lines are mixed with some dreadful clichés. The cinematography was superb throughout. The star performance is that of Therese Giehse. How did she not have a wider fame outside of Germany? Bernhard Wicki, who does pretty well, appears interestingly in the later movie, "Paris, Texas."

After his GOLDEN GLOBE for DEATH OF A SALESMAN with Fredric MARCH, the Hungarian director Laszlo BENEDEK also shot again for West German cinema. The film was shot in the Lüneburg Heath (near Walsrode). The producer was Erich POMMER, who had been trained by UFA and Hollywood and who received a GOLDEN GLOBE for this film in 1956.

Stettin shortly before the end of the Second World War: Four young high school students are recruited from school for the nearby war front. Their mothers (Hilde KRAHL, Therese GIEHSE, Ursula HERKING and Alice TREFF) are not at all enthusiastic about this and go to the front themselves to bring their pubescent boys home. What follows is basically a kind of road movie through the country, which is marked by the approaching end of the war and is already in the process of dissolution. Nobody takes the women seriously, but with iron persistence they get closer and closer to their sons. They meet emaciated soldiers who no longer laugh (Klaus KINSKI, GERMAN FILM AWARD 1979 for Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night), no longer take part (Maximilian SCHELL, ACADEMY AWARD 1962 for Judgment of Nuremberg) or wear their medals (Hans Christian BLECH ). Of course, the general (Ewald BALSER) has absolutely no understanding for women. But they find their sons, who are still full of deluded enthusiasm for war. It's good that there is still a brilliant captain (Bernhard WICKI, ACADEMY AWARD nomination in 1960 for Die Brücke) and a busy catering manager (Claus BIEDERSTAEDT)! But the Red Army is getting closer and closer...

A great film that once again shows how complex the all-too-often despised cinema of the West German film industry was. The great Therese GIEHSE, who was seen in important theater premieres of the plays by Bertolt BRECHT (Mother Courage and Her Children) and Friedrich DÜRRENMATT (The Visit of the Old Lady / The Physicists), was rightly awarded the GERMAN FILM AWARD in 1955.

Definitely worth seeing!