Les Croix de bois (1932) - film review

At the outbreak of World War I, Gilbert Demachy, an idealistic young student, enlists and is sent to the Western Front to fight for his motherland, France.  It is not long before he experiences his first taste of battle, in the muddy wastes of No Man’s Land.  Amidst the blazing gunfire and cacophony of exploding shells, he sees his comrades cut down, one by one.  His time away from this battlefield of death is but a brief respite.  Yet, amid these scenes from Hell, Demachy clings to life, hoping once more to be reunited with the woman he loves…

One of the most realistic and harrowing war films to have been made in France, Les Croix de bois still delivers quite a punch and bears a favourable comparison with Lewis Milestone’s better known American equivalent, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).  Based on a well-known novel by Roland Dorgelès (first published in 1919), the film shows the horrors of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary young man and serves as a fitting memorial to the senseless bloodshed, loss and devastation wrought by that conflict.

The film combines some highly imaginative expressionistic touches (most notably, the final sequence showing the fallen soldiers carrying their wooden crosses into the next world) with a brutal realism, achieved through some stunning battle scene reconstructions.   The cast comprises mainly veterans from the 1914-18 war, including the two leads: Charles Vanel and Pierre Blanchar, who both became major stars of French cinema in the 1930s.  This, together with the grimly matter-of-fact cinematography, gives the film a startling sense of reality and deeply moving humanity.  It is incredible how much suffering and loss the film manages to convey.  The continual ear-shattering explosions in the seemingly endless battle sequences bring home the unimaginable horror of trench warfare, whilst the gruesome spectacle of wounded soldiers lying abandoned in the mud, calling out for help that will never come, cuts into the spectator’s heart like a serrated knife.

Les Croix de bois is not an easy film to sit through, so vividly, so relentlessly does it evoke the true naked horror of war, yet it demands our attention.  It may lack the devastating poetry of Milestone’s film, but it is just as shocking and uncompromising in its depiction of the mindless slaughter of the so-called Great War.  “Never again” is what the film screams at us in a solemn howl of lamentation.  What a terrible irony that within seven years of this film’s release, the world would was once more be engulfed by war, so that another generation might be senselessly culled by bombs, bullets and bayonets, and more fields strewn with wooden crosses.

© James Travers 2006-2011

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I originally saw Wooden Crosses years ago in a battered old unsubtitled print being shown for the purposes of convincing US distributors to purchase the rights to show the film in the US. Needless to say, the distributors declined. In material I’ve read about the film, when it was re-released in France on TV, a number of WWI veterans committed suicide when viewing it. I can say that when I saw it untitled, the archetypal scenes were very easy to follow and the horrifying battles scenes were literally devastating. In some ways, more terrifying than that masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front. I’ve waited for years for the chance to watch it with English subtitles. I may have to write another comment then.   
Gary Friedman (New York City)  

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