Canter Bridge

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It’s a shame this American-made film portrayal of a WWI German unit trapped in the vanity of trench warfare didn’t have currency in 1930’s Germany. It might have made a dent in the German people’s hunger for the bellicose rhetoric happily supplied by the young National Socialist movement.

Alas, we forget too soon.

The acting and cinematography, advanced seventy-seven years ago, seem primitive to the modern eye. Yet the whole production prepares the viewer gradually for the gut-wrenching final scene. A war-weary ‘Paul’ reaches out from the mire of his entrenched position to pick up a butterfly, the most unlikely provider of color in the flattened landscape of France. Meanwhile, a French sniper draws a bead. After the shot is fired, we see the hand of this most poignant of veterans—returned to the front with just days left on his tour—go limp.

This film remains an important paragraph in cinema’s long conversation regarding warfare and the craftmanship employed, ineffectively, to ward it off.

Somehow, amid the washed-out grays on the screen, humanity and its deep, repeating tragedy, come persuasively to life. And then die.