In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Living my entire life in the United States, I’ve had the good fortune not to live through a war fought in my own country. For people that have been similarly blessed, it’s useful to get a reminder now and then of what war is actually like, lest we think that the sanitized news reports of far-off conflicts are telling us the whole story, or assume that the absence of any reporting at all in the American news media diminishes the horror of ongoing armed conflicts.
Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (Die Brücke, 1959), the first anti-war film produced in Germany after World War II, is just the kind of film that gives you a feel for what it’s like to be a young man when your country is at war and the battleground includes your hometown. The screenplay, by Michael Mansfeld, Karl-Wilhelm Vivier, and Wicki from Manfred Gregor-Dorfmeister’s autobiographical novel, centers on a group of seven young men, all about age 16, whose primary concerns include school, girls, riding their bikes, and hanging out by the river over which the eponymous bridge passes. They see the war as something exciting rather than as the existential threat that it is, running eagerly to inspect the damage made by the latest barrage of Allied bombs as their mothers call them to dinner.
It’s April 1945 and the war is almost over (Germany will surrender on May 7), which gives hope to the boys’ mothers who understand that war brings misfortune more often than glory. Then their draft notices arrive and, predictably, the young men are excited to have a chance to prove themselves. The phrase “eating your seed corn” comes to mind because while sacrificing these young men will not win the war for Germany, their absence or disability will make rebuilding the country that much harder. It’s easy to judge such decisions harshly, particularly from the comfortable standpoint of an American, but similar choices have been made in many countries and thus can’t be ascribed to a defect of any particular national character.
The screenplay takes care to give each of the young men and key adults individual characters and traits. Sigi (Günther Hoffmann) is the youngest and perhaps the poorest, as his mother (Edith Schultze-Westrum) takes in laundry. Jürgen (Frank Glaubrecht) hopes to win honor on the battlefield to live up to the example of his father, an officer killed in combat. Walter (Michael Hinz) is shocked to see his mother leaving town on the train and resents the fact that his father, a local Nazi party official, also finds a way to flee to safety. Karl (Karl Michael Balzer) is horrified to see the girl he likes in a compromising situation with his father. At the same time, the young men function most importantly as a collective, together representing everyone called to war before they are ready for it.
After one day of training, the young soldiers as assigned to guard a bridge leading into the town. The intent is to keep them safe from harm, but war has a way of screwing things up. A screen card just before the end credits informs you that “This event occurred on April 27, 1945. It was so unimportant that it was never mentioned in any war communique.” Opinions vary as to whether this statement is true in fact, but it is certainly true in principle: many young men were pointlessly sacrificed to a dying cause in the last days of the way, and the story presented here can stand in for all of their stories. It also rings true that their sacrifice was not noted in any official report, because this kind of pointless loss was so common and because the military and the government had bigger problems to deal with.
The Bridge seems to have been made on a low budget, but the constraints make it feel more real. It was shot in Cham, a small town in Bavaria near the border of what is now Czechia, and Gerd von Bonin’s cinematography creates a good, unglamorized, sense of what German life would be in a small town near the end of a long war. The Bridge was nominated for an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film) but lost out to Black Orpheus, a film that is much splashier but hasn’t aged nearly as well. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 763
Technical details: 103 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.37:1; German.
Edition reviewed: DVD
Extras: Interview with author Gregor Dorfmeister (who used the name Manfred Gregor-Dorfmeister when publishing the novel on which this film is based); interview with filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff on the importance of this film to German cinema; interview with director Bernhard Wiki; excerpts from a documentary by Wiki’s widow Elisabeth Wicki-Endriss including footage from the film shoot; booklet with an essay by film critic Terrence Rafferty.
Fun Fact: Germany had no tanks at the time this film was made, so the “tanks” you see are wooden models on truck chassis (the wheels are visible should you choose to look for them; I didn’t notice on my first watch of this film).
Parting Thought: War movies often play up the nobility of those who fight and those who keep the home fires burning, but The Bridge takes the opposite approach: the long grind of war seems to have brought out the worst in many people. Did the fact that this film was produced by the losing side play a part in the choice of that approach?
