Two Tommy runners must navigate it to save a battalion from slaughter. It creates a vast liminal space for the film to explore with its one-shot device (actually, a few shots stitched invisibly together), a haunted landscape straight out of an eerie horror film. It deserves to be better known.’Ī war film made with all the latest technical wizardry and some help from legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, 1917 is a story of courage and duty set in a very specific historical moment: the sudden retreat of the German army to the Hindenburg line in the penultimate year of the war. The trench and battle scenes are superb and incredibly realistic – the fine detail shows that it’s a “veterans film”. It asks who was to blame for the war and suggests that the German and French soldiers were comrades and not enemies. The expert view: ‘ Westfront 1918 is a visceral, harder view of the war from the ordinary soldier’s point of view. It helped to have the ultimate Method cast: many of the actors had experienced combat first-hand. There’s not a whiff of gallantry here, just the desperate courage of men in an impossible situation. Oddly, it feels more of an influence on the 2022 All Quiet in its full-bore trench scenes and fatalist mood. Adding Sheriff’s postscript showing how the losses affected those left at home – which is always missing in the play – is a nice touch.’īest know for a pair of Louise Brooks-starring Weimar fever dreams – Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl – GW Pabst’s downbeat but technically virtuosic German end-of-World-War-1 drama suffered in the shadow of All Quiet of the Western Front, which was also released in 1930 and with which it shares distinct similarities.
It also shows how the officers in an infantry company lived and worked and fought and existed with each other, written by a veteran, which gives it that extra level of credibility. The expert view: ‘It depicts what, to me, is that essential moment on the eve of battle: a great storm is coming, and the men all sense it.
Strung out over a thin khaki line, the British Army is about to be battered – and this small but richly drawn platoon is at the sharpest end of it.
But ‘The Duchess’ director Saul Dibbs’s adaptation – unlike the 1930 James Whale version – uses nimble camerawork and imaginative framing to expand the canvas and deliver a powerful human drama of doomed men in the subterranean world of the trenches. A long-time interviewer of Great War veterans himself and the host of The Old Front Line podcast, he brings a unique perspective on their historical strengths – and weaknesses.įrequently revived as a stage play, RC Sherriff’s claustrophobic and nail-gnawingly tense snapshot of a British dugout on the eve of the German Spring Offensive of 1918 isn’t immediately cinematic. To rank these films is a tricky task, so we enlisted the help of military historian, author and podcaster Paul Reed to cast an expert eye over them. Maybe because they’ve wrestled with complex themes of sacrifice, trauma, justice, social hierarchy, nationhood and the nature of comradeship, and eschewed simpler heroics, films like Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front and La Grande Illusion have only grown in stature over the years.Īnd the war’s enduring place in the public consciousness has seen a new wave of Great War films, with 1917, They Shall Not Grow Old and Journey’s End, and Germany producing its biggest contribution to the canon with Netflix’s new take on All Quiet on the Western Front. World War I has inspired not just some of the greatest war films, but a few of the greatest films ever made.
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