Company K

The old National Guard ad used to say, "It's not just a job, it's an adventure!" Robert Clem's adaptation of William March's book of the same title retains the overall humanity of men in combat but is clear to dispel any myth of glorious combat action. Service men and women will enjoy this film for its accuracy and will relate to the characters and their experiences. The book is a timeless classic. Robert Clem has done a masterful job of portraying the story for us to enjoy and learn from.

This film is a timeless examination of how combat affects men and their lives after the combat is over. As an officer in the U.S. Army myself, I recognize and relate to the characters and their experiences. There are genuine events portrayed that have been repeated time-after-time since William March wrote his book. As a primer for the military, this could help leaders to identify when their subordinates are facing moral dilemmas perhaps at the cost of their own life. It will help the first line combatants to remember to remain vigilant or suffer the consequences of inattentiveness. It will also help the general public to understand a bit more what is involved with service in the military.

Certainly there is a close camaraderie demonstrated in the film among the fighting Marines. That camaraderie is present today too. Those men struggled upon their return home when their close knit organization was no longer around to provide support (positive or negative). Today's veteran also all-too-often returns home facing a public that really doesn't understand or is often unwilling to accept the fact that waging war is not simply a job.

Today's U.S. Military is all volunteer and most personnel re-enlist themselves to defend the ideals of freedom defined in the U.S. Constitution. The military and society are partners receiving mutual benefit in turn for that service. I think this film is clear on long-term effects from combat.

I appreciate Mr. Clem's attention to detail and accuracy in creating this film. His adaptation is a poignant work of craftsmanship. I highly recommend this film.

Before he found his writer's voice, writer William March spent the better part of fifteen years thinking about the horrors he experienced as an infantryman in World War One. The book was titled "Company K," and has become a war classic alongside "Johnny Got His Gun" and "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Seventy years following the book's publication, filmmaker Robert Clem has converted March's story into an accessible and engaging documentary.

"Company K" is Clem's latest, and in my opinion, best work. The film provides a stark and compelling look at the First World War in which 100,000 American men died, although the memory of that war has virtually vanished. (I know Robert Clem and his work from the documentary he made partly of the life of my grandfather, in another WWI film "War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator.")

Using a score of vignettes that roughly follow March's written format, the film portrays war's farce and horror. Here is a young soldier joining his cohorts in a French bar. One of the hostesses seduces the man by telling how her husband recently died on the Front. It might have turned into a love story, except for the fact that as soon as they return to the bar, she moves on to the next soldier. Our naive protagonist is initially dumbstruck, and then becomes enraged, attacking his company mates.

A nice allegory of how war operates on the push-pull emotions of lust and betrayal.

Another off-battle scene could easily have occurred in peacetime. The company's commanding office bullies his men relentlessly, tearing up their shore passes one by one as he throws their washed clothes into the mud. "Wash them again," he commands. The men are crestfallen. These opening scenes quickly move to grittier stuff. If it's gore you're looking for, you won't be disappointed. The violence is low key--and devastating. One scene shows two soldiers coming across a dead German. The men are hungry, and discover a loaf of bread on the dead man. The scene might not work in color, as the realism could prove a distraction. When the men discover the bread to be soaked in the soldier's blood, they hesitate. One after the other they dig in, swallowing every bite.

Another scene develops more slowly. Americans are ordered to shoot German prisoners. At first the men resist, but then comes the clincher.

"These prisoners are not really surrendering," the sergeant tells them. "It's an old trick. The sergeant's words prove effective. His men's astonished sense of betrayal pushes them into slaughtering their counterparts. The scene proves to be a harrowing preview of the Nazi techniques used twenty years later.

Company K is particularly instructive in today's political turmoil. You won't hear any arguments among academics or war hawks that the Great War lived up to its name, or succeeded in making the world Safe for Democracy. In Robert Clem's "Company K," we experience what poet Robert Lowell called war's "blundering butcher" as it tromped across Europe and left scars that remain with us today.

OK i have to get this off my chest first of all to the people saying its the greatest war movie ever made. the movie itself i felt was poorly made. mostly because of the bad acting. the acting is pretty bad even for a Indi film. but besides the acting being bad it really isn't that bad of a movie. there's lots of action, the story is easy to follow, and the characters are even likable which is surprising by their acting. another plus is that it is a World War 1 movie. you hardly ever get to see or even hear about World War 1. this movie definitely got what war can do to a person mentally. this movie also is good for accuracy. overall if you can overlook the bad acting this is still a really good movie.

Company K by Robert Clem is a serious work that should be seen, and, more importantly, re-seen.

The film begins with a quotation from William March's autobiographical World War I novel of the same name, but it could have begun with the quotation from Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front: "This book is neither an accusation nor a confession. It will simply tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war." There are differences. Remarque's book was about German soldiers, whereas Company K is about American soldiers. And Company K is more of an accusation and a confession, although the film has an overall documentary feel.

The plot is a string of episodes, each focusing on a key experience of a different soldier in the unit. The structure follows March's plan for his book where each story is placed on a wheel and the wheel spun "in an unending circle of pain." Some viewers might find this narrative structure too unusual because there isn't really a high climax. The end of the war is simply a brief episode bridging to the postwar traumas of Private Joe Delaney (March) and others. This anticlimactic episode is handled subtly: The soldiers don't jump up and throw their helmets in the air; they sigh, stare dumbly, and drop their helmets to the ground.

Many other episodes have similar ironic strength. A country soldier who has never seen an airplane exclaims one's approach; he is strafed. Inexperienced officers talk Ivy League politics but make battlefield blunders; one attempts suicide and another is murdered by an exhausted enlisted man. Two soldiers with grumbling stomachs eat blood-soaked enemy pumpernickel. An experienced French prostitute admits that she had promised to save herself for her boyfriend until he was killed early in the war.

In a prologue scene before the opening credits, Delaney tells his wife of his book about the war. She advises him to leave out the part about murdering a group of German prisoners. It's a well-chosen prologue -- the events surrounding that episode and its aftermath are the film's most powerful.

The young actors are excellent and perform with conviction. Dialog is well written and delivered. The authenticity of uniforms, weapons, vehicles, and battlefield locations is impressive. There is no cast of a thousand extras, but the judicious use of actual WWI footage expands the scope some.

Company K is one of those few films that get better with re-seeing. Fresh nuances appear each time – wiping blood off bayonets, soldiers crossing themselves as shells falls on friends, battle-fatigued faces – and the effect grows. This film ought to be studied alongside the novel in college courses.

For this movie, my recommendation is to read the book. I have not, and do not discount the power which may have been conveyed by the original author who lived the experiences.

But all credibility which this movie may have had, washed away for me because there was no dirt, no mud, no decay, no rats, no lice, no corpse stink, no depiction of the truly terrible conditions in which these people fought and slogged and died.

All of the soldiers' kit was unblemished, unstained, unmuddied, looking like the producer did not want to risk the expense of getting it cleaned upon its return to the props department. The trenches looked like they had been built that afternoon.

You want to tell an effective story with pictures, you have to make the pictures right, or the story doesn't get told.

Go watch "All Quiet On The Western Front" for the quintessential depiction of World War I.