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Between Remarque and Heller, Stanley Kubrick raging in the trenches. The cratered battlefield ca. 1916, a profusion of horizontal scans to register the vertical structure of troops and aristocrats. Venal generals in lavish chateaus, one's corruption is as plain as a scar (George Macready) while the other's is camouflaged by a sardonic twinkle (Adolphe Menjou). Mist and barbed wire on the front, shame for the colonel (Kirk Douglas) in his tenebrous bunker plus a bit of jittery absurdism amid soldiers: "I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow, only of getting killed." Flag and bullfighting cape figure in the metaphor, No Man's Land is the infernal abattoir (a jagged Wyndham Lewis strain is discernible), just a whistle and a wave before the onslaught. To be alive in war turns out to be enough proof of cowardice, "a perfect tonic" for morale has three scapegoats in a rigged courtroom: The craven officer's witness (Ralph Meeker), the runt who drew the short straw (Joseph Turkel), and the "social undesirable" (Timothy Carey). "If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones!" Cycles of futility, theaters of cruelty—a persistent Kubrick arena, in it idealists and cynics pity each other. Back at Dovzhenko for the corpse smoldering from a panicky grenade (Arsenal), ahead to Franju for the priest blessing the prisoner tied to a stretcher (Thomas l'Imposteur). The trial is a brisk affair on marble floors under vast paintings, testimonies and records are technicalities, Douglas' screed on injustice is a mere echo. The execution by contrast is pure elongated excruciation, the walk to the fusillade is a symphony of drums, sobs, crushed gravel and distant birds. "This sort of thing is always rather grim. But this one had a kind of splendor, don't you think?" "Der treue Husar" in due time becomes "The Mickey Mouse March." Cinematography by Georg Krause. With Wayne Morris, Richard Anderson, Bert Freed, Emile Meyer, Peter Capell, Jerry Hausner, Kem Dibbs, and Christiane Kubrick. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |