Les croix de bois

Terrific dark anti-war WWI film, light years ahead of it's time stylistically, with battle scenes that rival (and clearly inspired) Kubrick's great 'Paths of Glory'.

More cynical, cutting, and real than 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. The film focuses on the various members of a battalion who are basically canon fodder. There's no real lead, just an observation of these slowly hardening men, as a group, and no real plot, just a series of episodes.

Not every episode is as strong as the other, but enough are so powerful they make this a special and important film, amazingly directed for its time.

My summary seems to imply I found this film tedious. No, that's not the case. If anything it's very close to a masterpiece. There's not enough space to recount its memorable sequences. In fact everything about it is memorable. What stands out is the way war reduces individuals to cogs in a machine of death and destruction. A person's background, education, social standing, his worth as a person, counts for nothing. All that matters is his ability to run headlong into a volley of bullets in what is surely diametrically opposed to his instinct for survival. The politics of war are useless, nobody really cares why they're fighting. They only want to stay alive. This is best portrayed in the scenes of the tunnel dug by the Germans to place explosives under the French positions. The French soldiers know full well what is about to happen but their superiors do nothing to protect them and in scene after scene they wait for the sound of the digging to stop. When they're relieved they rush to shoulder their packs and hurry out of their now compromised safe-place seemingly unconcerned for their replacements. They're safely away when the explosion takes place. All we see is the plume of smoke and are left to imagine the horror above, like the soldiers, who continue on their way, only too glad to be alive. And this is only one vignette of the many that make up this film. But if there's one thing it brings out most vividly is how tedious war is. As a civilian I have a distorted view of war as ceaseless combat. Intellectually I know this to be false but our arts concentrate on the action in war and ignore the endless hours in-between, when nothing happens and soldiers just wait and wait and wait. "Wooden Crosses" portrays this tedium better than any other I know of. We, the viewers, get caught up in it, are oppressed by it and want to turn away but can't because we have become involved in the nearly anonymous soldiers and want to see them come out alive even though we have come to expect the worst. This is not an easy film to watch. But it should be required viewing.

Based on a biographical novel concerning life during WW1 this is included in the Raymond Bernard Box set from Eclipse (ie. Criterion). Made in 1932 the film seems to have been made years later. The technical aspects of the film are astounding. a blending of silent and sound techniques with images that foreshadow the Hollywood films of the 1940's, the war documentaries of the second world war not to mention modern films such as Saving Private Ryan and the Thin Red Line this film for the most part doesn't feel 75 years old.

The plot follows a company of men from enlistment to the end. After a slow start where the film introduces everyone and we get a feel for the characters the movie moves to the trenches and battle where we are placed into harms way with the men we have been introduced to. What follows are essentially a series of set pieces that move the men further and further in to war's nightmare. There is a sequence where the men wait in the trenches and in one bunker in particular, where they can hear the German tunneling below them to place charges which will, when detonated blow them to kingdom come. Its an unnerving sequence since the men know whats coming but are unable to do anything about it- except hope that their rotation comes before the bombs go off. The centerpiece of the film is an never ending attack, on ward and onward and onward. How could anyone do such a thing? As a title card say the attack lasted for ten days. I was exhausted by the sequence and it lasted only for twenty or so minutes. Its an amazing piece of film making.

If there is a flaw in the film its that the dialog sequences seem more Hollywood convention (if you'll allow me to say about a film made in France). The group of men are your standard bunch and they all seem to get lost. Not that it ruins the film, it doesn't, it just keeps the film from having that complete emotional connection.

Rightly considered a classic film, this is must viewing for anyone who loves the cinema.

Comments on this film are bound to centre around comparisons to All Quiet On the Western Front - reasonably enough, since Wooden Crosses was specifically made as a rival to that film. It isn't as engrossing as Milestone's classic, perhaps because it never really characterises the soldiers strongly enough, and also because it lacks the variety of incident which makes All Quiet so entertaining despite its grim subject matter and episodic structure.

But both these flaws are also strengths: Bernard's skill in conveying the de-humanising effects of war, as well as the sheer repetitious tedium of the ordinary soldier's experience, lend to his film a bitterness and realism which its - occasionally naive - American predecessor lacked. There are one or two scenes in this film so bitter and horrifying that no war film matched them until at least the 1950s.

For this reason, the film may find more sympathy with today's audiences, who - after Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Thin Red Line, Jarhead etc - expect a war film to immerse them in sheer violent futility for two hours, and are likely to regard lack of incident as a mark of authenticity.

This film is nothing if not authentic (the cast was made up entirely of war veterans), and the documentary realism of the battle scenes was a real shock to me. Complaints that, unlike most war films, it makes no reference to the wider context of the war, are understandable...but I think they miss the point. The film is indeed a violent mess: what else must it have felt like for the men in the trenches? Wooden Crosses faithfully plays out Lew Ayres' famous speech from All Quiet (maybe paraphrasing here): 'We live in the trenches and we fight. We try not to get killed. That's all.'

I thought I already knew how inventive and daring early '30s film-makers were, but just on the strength of this film (haven't watched Les Miserables yet...) Bernard deserves to stand with the best of them - Lang, Milestone, Vidor, Eisenstein. The lyrical beauty of so many of the images in Wooden Crosses, and the intense horror of some others, left me gaping in disbelief at the screen, and will always stay with me. Perhaps because it's 76 years old, and because it's such an unsung pioneer, this film makes me revert to clichés and superlatives. But it really is one of the very best war films ever made.

1930 saw two great anti-war films about WWI--"All Quiet On the Western Front" and the German-made "Westfront 1918". Both were unrelentingly grim and accurate in their portrayal of war as a never-ending hellish existence. These were certainly NOT the glorious depictions of war you usually see for WWII. This is for several reasons. First, WWI was unusual in its brutality and pointlessness for the average soldier--far,far worse than wars before or since. Second, the 1930s was an era when the reality of the past war had finally sunk in--that many millions had essentially died for nothing. As a result, the anti-war movement was exceptionally strong. Third, unlike the films made during WWII which were made to bolster the war effort, this WWI type of film was made to show how war sucks and should not be fought--or perhaps how not to fight it.

While "Wooden Crosses" is one of the great anti-war films of this era, it's not one of the very, very best (such as the two mentioned above). The biggest reason is that the characters are more ill-defined--and so one person looks pretty much like another. This makes for a less satisfying film--but also perhaps reiterates the anonymity of war. And, I must point out, it does a terrific job of showing what war is like--with gobs of explosions and death. But, because other films had come out before it that were just a bit better, this film somehow got lost in the process. A truly exceptional film--but try the other two first. And, if you'd like, also try "The Eagle and the Hawk" as well as "Ace of Aces"--two excellent American anti-war films that truly personalize the awfulness of war.