J'accuse! (1938)
Directed by Abel Gance

Film Review

The scars of the First World War had scarcely begun to heal before Europe began sliding towards another, potentially even more disastrous conflagration.  Abel Gance's J'Accuse! (1938) was the most strident of a number of films made on the eve of WWII that sought to revive memories of the horrors of the previous conflict, in the hope (vain, as it turned out) of averting a similar calamity.  Unable to come up with an original conceit, Gance plundered his previous 1919 film of the same title and, with the advantage of sound, succeeded in giving it a frenziedly apocalyptic feel.  Looking as if it was knocked out in a hurry, this overwrought remake is considered vastly inferior to Gance's original film, but as an anti-war piece it is surprisingly effective.  It may not have prevented the Second World War (Gance must have been either supremely naive or supremely arrogant to think that such a thing could have been possible) but as a statement of mankind's tragic propensity for war it is extremely powerful, despite some obvious shortcomings.

J'Accuse! begins superbly and ends horrifically.  What happens in between is perhaps best glossed over and is scarcely worth commenting on - a stodgily indigestible dollop of melodrama that is there merely to pad the film out to a full two hours.  Gance it at his best in the first thirty minutes of the film, which, dispensing with the mostly redundant back-story of the original film, plunges us straight into the bubbling cauldron of trench warfare during (as it turns out) the dying days of WWI.  The soldiers, most of whom are fated to die, are authentically drawn and each has a story that grabs our attention and sympathy, even those who are on screen for barely a minute.  The brutality, inhumanity and injustice of the war are eloquently expressed through the juxtaposition of touching little vignettes and archive footage depicting the devastation of the war.  With an economy that is rarely found in his other films, Gance gets across the terrible human cost of warfare, and if he had ended the film after the fourth reel he could hardly have delivered a more effective anti-war statement.

Alas, Gance didn't stop there and for the next hour we are dragged across the dreary no man's land that is 1930s-style melodrama at its least edifying.  An unlikeably over-the-top Victor Francen goes slowly off the rails as he devises inventions that will, ironically, make another war more likely (can someone please explain how bullet-proof glass is likely to prevent a war?).  Meanwhile, the daughter of his erstwhile sweetheart, whom he no longer loves out of respect for a dead friend, has fallen for an utter cad who, not content with turning Francen's glassmaking workshops into armaments factories, intends stealing his inventions as a war profiteer.  How this mass of contrived nonsense was ever supposed to avert WWII is anyone's guess.

And then it becomes a zombie movie.

It's as if Abel Gance has nipped home for his lunch and George A. Romero has suddenly taken over the shop.  Grisly spectres are seen arising from their graves, most looking very much the worse for wear, and start creating panic in the streets in true schlock B-movie fashion.  Having tried a more humane approach at the beginning of the film, Gance now adopts the somewhat less subtle stategy of scaring his audience to death.  Massive close-ups of partly decomposed human cadavers loom into view, staring at us with sightless eyes (and sometimes just bare eye sockets) in a way that screams at us the film's title.  "J'Accuse!" these decaying remnants of the Great War seem to say as they float eerily across the screen, superimposed over the monuments that were intended as a lasting reminder of their sacrifice.  Henri Verdun's swelling score builds to an ominous crescendo and can only heighten the horrific impact of the film's final sequences.  "This is what's coming!", Gance's grotesque parade of death proclaims (actually it would be another thirty years before Romero got round to making Night of the Living Dead).  J'Accuse! managed to get a H (horror) classification in the UK but its nightmarish finale pales into nothing compared with what was to be unleashed on the world over the next six years.  Abel Gance may have given French cinema its first full-on zombie movie but when it came to imagining the misery and suffering that WWII would bring he was way, way out of his league.

Film Synopsis

After serving in the First World War, Jean Diaz returns to his home town but cannot bring himself to continue his affair with Edith, the wife of one of his fallen comrades. Instead, he resumes his life as an inventor, dedicating himself to creating the means by which a second catastrophic war may be avoided.  As another war seems imminent, his business partner Henri Chimay steals his inventions without his knowing and begins manufacturing them for the war effort.  When he discovers this, Jean begins to lose his grip on reality and returns to Verdun, intent on raising the dead from their graves...