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  • Film Chronicle
  • Jefferson Hunter (bio)
Film Chronicle: Yankee Doodle Dandy, directed by Michael Curtiz (Warner Home Video, 2005);
Shoulder Arms, directed by Charles Chaplin (in The Essential Chaplin Vol. 10, Cobra Entertainment, 2010);
The Big Parade, directed by King Vidor (Warner Home Video, 2013);
Westfront 1918, directed by G. W. Pabst (YouTube); La grande illusion, directed by Jean Renoir (Criterion Collection, 1999);
Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Criterion Collection, 2010);
Oh! What a Lovely War, directed by Richard Attenborough (Paramount, 2006);
Frantz, directed by François Ozon (Music Box Films, 2017);
Broken Lullaby, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (Universal, 2015);
A Very Long Engagement, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Warner Home Video, 2006)

A century ago, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the guns on the Western front fell silent. At that moment a daunting task of reconstruction began, and an equally daunting task of comprehension. Question followed on question. What had caused the war in the first place? How had a civilized Europe allowed it to happen? Mechanized combat, the experience of the trenches, the dogfights in the air—what were all of those really like? Could grievously wounded men, wounded physically and psychologically, ever be made whole again? How would 20th-century history and political geography be shaped by events that began simply and violently with an assassination in Sarajevo, then spread to Italy, Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, the Balkans, Poland, gallant little Belgium, and northern France, until battle lines finally spread over a whole continent?

Of course World War I eventually engaged the United States too. Sent across the Atlantic to fight, our doughboys promised not to come back until it was "over over there," to quote George M. Cohan's great 1917 song. You can see and hear the birth of "Over There" in Warner Brothers' 1942 biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy, with James Cagney as Cohan. As he hears the arpeggio of a trumpet call the composer looks thoughtfully into the distance, then sits down at a battered upright under a glaring stage light and tinkles the famous melody into existence, phrase by patriotic phrase. But Yankee Doodle Dandy is only one film among a multitude. In the century stretching between 1918 and now the cinema has repeatedly answered questions about, and built up its own picture of, World War I. Films have confirmed or denied ideologies, explored individual cases of gallantry or cowardice, and above all enshrined certain images in the collective [End Page 310] imagination: the dawn patrol, the bugles calling thinly in the still air, the exploding shells, the poppies blooming red (with blood?) on trench parapets, the rattle of machine guns, the primitive tanks clanking over sodden fields, the Zepps raiding London, the massed ranks in khaki or Feldgrau advancing, bayonets fixed, over no man's land, through gaps in the wire . . . all this eventually came to the screen. For that matter, it is still coming to the screen, as for example in the contemporary action pic Wonder Woman. Amid the cartoon antics and mythological hokum of Patty Jenkins's film, World War I is there to be seen in trenches and artillery bombardments, in a no man's land complete with blasted trees and muddy shell holes, in booming trench mortars and machine-gun bullets traversing the ruined landscape—even if, thanks to CGI, all the ordnance bounces harmlessly off the Amazonian heroine's wondrous vambraces. The truth is, we are all still over there, cinematically, and it is still not quite over over there.

One of the earliest World War I films was Chaplin's First National feature Shoulder Arms, released in the last months of 1918 when...

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