This interview will get you to the heart of this film by Raymond Bernard …. it is about 10 minutes long. Please watch the whole thing ….
https://youtu.be/ZZdCPmghNAo?si=rBvmnOgF5UBCrsWh
Criterion Review, Scott Nye, 2015
https://criterioncast.com/reviews/blu-ray-reviews/scott-reviews-raymond-bernards-wooden-crosses-masters-of-cinema-blu-ray-review
Criterion Cast review.
https://criterioncast.com/column/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series-raymond-bernards-wooden-crosses
Guardian short review:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/26/philip-french-classic-dvd-wooden-crosses-raymond-bernard
DVDBeaver review of Criterion DVD of the restoration
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/raymond_bernard.htm
Here are a couple more contributions.
Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator; that is, it gathers the available reviews of a film and publishes some sort of average. It collects the reviews of both professional reviewers and those members of the public who have seen the film and are willing to comment. In the case of Wooden Crosses there simply aren't enough professional reviews out there to draw any conclusions. The public, on the other hand, was mesmerized by it.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/les_croix_de_bois
Rotten Tomatoes.Wooden Crosses (1932) ⭐ 7.7 | Drama, War
imdb.com
The original New York Times review of Wooden Crosses, from 1932.
LES CROIX DE BOIS"; French War Picture Acclaimed by Critics as A Masterpiece of Realism and Simplicity
HERBERT L. MATTHEWS.
April 3, 1932
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
[Matthews was the Paris correspondent for the New York Times.]
ONE of the great films in motion picture history opened in Paris last week—the long-awaited war picture, "Les Croix de Bois" ("Wooden Crosses"). The impression created by it has been overwhelming—the critic, the public, and, most significant of all, the war veteran hailing it as the first and truest expression of the war as it really was. As such it is a historical document of inestimable value, but it is more than that, too It is a thrilling expression of human heroism. The acclaim with which this picture has been greeted is justly mixed with exultation. The French are proud of themselves that after these years when even the best war pictures, such as "All Quiet on the Western Front," found it necessary to inject romantic, rhetorical and even bombastic passages, not to mention dubious anecdotes, a French company has done the soldier the justice of depicting his life at the front just as it was. Here we have artistic sincerity—no frills and furbelows, no lovely girls, no artifices, no freak photography, no declamation, no exaggeration.
Raymond Bernard decided that nothing could be more dramatic or thrilling than the simple truth. One would think such a conclusion rather obvious, but the answer to that is that it took fourteen years to figure it out. As one critic (and war veteran) put it: "The film 'Les Croix de Bois'marks a totally new stage in war cinema photography. Will any one dare, after this, dupe us and abuse us with falsely heroic daubings intended to depict the war?"
A Fine Script. To begin with, the director has a perfect scenario in the form of the book of the same name by Raymond Dorgelès—a work easily comparable in its way to the German "All Quiet on the Western Front," and the English play, "Journey's End." It is obvious, too, that M. Bernard had the complete support of his producers, PathéNatan. Last, but far from least, he had truly superb material in his actors—every one of them a war veteran of whom the director only asked that they relive the terrible days of 1915. The result is a picture which says the last word on its subject. It is at the same time a document and a work of art—a history that is an epic of heroism and martyrdom. Though French to the very core, its appeal is universal. Though the protagonists are simply a handful of men from a French infantry regiment, through the artistic fusion of the elementary passions which animate them they became every soldier, Everyman.
The plot is very simple. We see a squad from the Thirty-ninth Infantry fight through certain dark months of 1915 in the Champagne district, until every man of them is a casualty. First we see the flame burning above the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe; then row upon row of soldiers standing at attention and fading into row upon row of wooden crosses; finally a brief vision of Paris on the day the war was declared, and the story begins.
In No Man's Land. Into the billets of a rest camp comes a young law student, Gilbert Demachy, to join a regiment which is a cross-section of the French nation—a baker, some farmers, a few workmen—in no sense professional soldiers. And then one follows their terrible and sublime history—an attack, the patrol in No Man's Land, the rest camp, the return to the lines, the parade of the survivors before the General, then back to the lines again. Only one escapes alive--Sulphart, bluff and hearty diamond in the rough, whose finger is blown off, thus permitting him to retire. The picture ends with Gilbert Demachy, intellectual, sensitive, courageous, dying alone in the slime of a deserted battlefield, while over his head in a symbolic procession file an array of the dead, each carrying his wooden cross.
It is, more than anything, simply a series of episodes, but linked by the common themes of loyalty, courage, suffering and death. Certain fragments stand out as unforgettable. There is Gilbert Demachy, visiting the grave of a comrade to scatter over it the fragments of a letter which came too late. There is the death of Corporal Breval—a simple, brave soldier who had gone out near the enemy's lines to seek water for his squad and had been shot down. There is the parade of the survivors—one of the most thrilling and heart-throbbing scenes the moving pictures have given us.
There is, above all, the attack—a stupendous technical tour de force, faithful to the smallest details. It is this fidelity which is the outstanding achievement of the film. The authors sought only to give us the reality in all its horrors, its crudities, its agonies and its greatness. The dialogue is taken directly from the book and consists chiefly of biting sallies, grim jokes, slang phrases—all the restrained emotion of men living at the breaking point, afraid to give way to their feelings, but seeing with bitter humor the irony of their situation. There is an exaltation about the grim jesting in the face of tragedy which gives a curious touch of nobility to what they say.
The coarseness, the blasphemy even, upon which men fall back in times like those, is but a camouflage for emotions which must not be expressed lest they make men lose their courage. This quality, which Dorgelès expressed so beautifully in his book, is expertly caught for the screen.
The Lesson. Inevitably, in the wealth of discussion the picture has already aroused, the question cropped up as to whether "Les Croix de Bois" was an argument for or against war. Certainly, the producers, the director and the author of the book meant it to be against. So much so, in fact, that the first showing of it was in Geneva for the delegates to the Disarmament Conference. However, the next was here in Paris for the veterans of the Thirty-ninth Infantry. Then the press saw it, and finally it was opened to the public at a gala performance which the President of France attended. In each case—particularly the press comments—the horror and anguish and tragedy of the subject were stressed.
The picture itself consciously points no moral at all. It simply presents war as it was, and the audience writes its own moral. The key, then, lies with the spectators and their reactions. Your correspondent attended the press showing, and there, at least, the feeling was unmistakable. The applause for the dying Corporal Breval was a tribute to fine acting, but that for Demachy standing beside the grave of his comrade was a tribute to the fallen soldier, as well as to the beauty and pathos of the scene. And the waves upon waves of applause which punctuated the various attack scenes were the result of sheer exultation, which reached a tremendous climax in the marvelous parade of the survivors.
Heroes of the Past. After all, these people were saying to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, men were giants in those days. The high courage, the unselfishness, the uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, the sacrifice of life for ideals they thought true—these were great qualities. This particular audience must have been thinking: These men we see here were Frenchmen, our own flesh and blood. And what about the veterans, of whom there must have been hundreds in the audience? Could any of them have failed to think that just to march once more in such a parade of the survivors they would not go through again the inferno of those days? So, it would be hard to say that "Les Croix de Bois" is the perfect argument for peace—which is just as well. A work of art need not point a moral. Raymond Bernard has produced a great picture, and nothing else matters.
This article looks at the war through the movie and through the novel the movie was based on.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ifr/article/view/7686/8743
"This essay will examine two important combat novels usually regarded as pacifist or antiwar novels, and the films based on them: first, Roland Dorgelès's testimonial Les Croix de bois (1919) and Raymond Bernard's 1932 film of it; and second, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) and Lewis Milestone's 1930 American film version of it, All Quiet on the Western Front. The transformation of novelistic fictions into film fictions and the popular, critical, and even official reception of these works reveal patterns of national thought between the wars - patterns which have left their legacy in our use of political terminology to describe cultural artifacts and movements."
https://youtu.be/ZZdCPmghNAo?si=rBvmnOgF5UBCrsWh
Criterion Review, Scott Nye, 2015
https://criterioncast.com/reviews/blu-ray-reviews/scott-reviews-raymond-bernards-wooden-crosses-masters-of-cinema-blu-ray-review
Criterion Cast review.
https://criterioncast.com/column/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series/a-journey-through-the-eclipse-series-raymond-bernards-wooden-crosses
Guardian short review:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/26/philip-french-classic-dvd-wooden-crosses-raymond-bernard
DVDBeaver review of Criterion DVD of the restoration
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/raymond_bernard.htm
Here are a couple more contributions.
Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator; that is, it gathers the available reviews of a film and publishes some sort of average. It collects the reviews of both professional reviewers and those members of the public who have seen the film and are willing to comment. In the case of Wooden Crosses there simply aren't enough professional reviews out there to draw any conclusions. The public, on the other hand, was mesmerized by it.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/les_croix_de_bois
Rotten Tomatoes.Wooden Crosses (1932) ⭐ 7.7 | Drama, War
imdb.com
The original New York Times review of Wooden Crosses, from 1932.
LES CROIX DE BOIS"; French War Picture Acclaimed by Critics as A Masterpiece of Realism and Simplicity
HERBERT L. MATTHEWS.
April 3, 1932
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
[Matthews was the Paris correspondent for the New York Times.]
ONE of the great films in motion picture history opened in Paris last week—the long-awaited war picture, "Les Croix de Bois" ("Wooden Crosses"). The impression created by it has been overwhelming—the critic, the public, and, most significant of all, the war veteran hailing it as the first and truest expression of the war as it really was. As such it is a historical document of inestimable value, but it is more than that, too It is a thrilling expression of human heroism. The acclaim with which this picture has been greeted is justly mixed with exultation. The French are proud of themselves that after these years when even the best war pictures, such as "All Quiet on the Western Front," found it necessary to inject romantic, rhetorical and even bombastic passages, not to mention dubious anecdotes, a French company has done the soldier the justice of depicting his life at the front just as it was. Here we have artistic sincerity—no frills and furbelows, no lovely girls, no artifices, no freak photography, no declamation, no exaggeration.
Raymond Bernard decided that nothing could be more dramatic or thrilling than the simple truth. One would think such a conclusion rather obvious, but the answer to that is that it took fourteen years to figure it out. As one critic (and war veteran) put it: "The film 'Les Croix de Bois'marks a totally new stage in war cinema photography. Will any one dare, after this, dupe us and abuse us with falsely heroic daubings intended to depict the war?"
A Fine Script. To begin with, the director has a perfect scenario in the form of the book of the same name by Raymond Dorgelès—a work easily comparable in its way to the German "All Quiet on the Western Front," and the English play, "Journey's End." It is obvious, too, that M. Bernard had the complete support of his producers, PathéNatan. Last, but far from least, he had truly superb material in his actors—every one of them a war veteran of whom the director only asked that they relive the terrible days of 1915. The result is a picture which says the last word on its subject. It is at the same time a document and a work of art—a history that is an epic of heroism and martyrdom. Though French to the very core, its appeal is universal. Though the protagonists are simply a handful of men from a French infantry regiment, through the artistic fusion of the elementary passions which animate them they became every soldier, Everyman.
The plot is very simple. We see a squad from the Thirty-ninth Infantry fight through certain dark months of 1915 in the Champagne district, until every man of them is a casualty. First we see the flame burning above the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe; then row upon row of soldiers standing at attention and fading into row upon row of wooden crosses; finally a brief vision of Paris on the day the war was declared, and the story begins.
In No Man's Land. Into the billets of a rest camp comes a young law student, Gilbert Demachy, to join a regiment which is a cross-section of the French nation—a baker, some farmers, a few workmen—in no sense professional soldiers. And then one follows their terrible and sublime history—an attack, the patrol in No Man's Land, the rest camp, the return to the lines, the parade of the survivors before the General, then back to the lines again. Only one escapes alive--Sulphart, bluff and hearty diamond in the rough, whose finger is blown off, thus permitting him to retire. The picture ends with Gilbert Demachy, intellectual, sensitive, courageous, dying alone in the slime of a deserted battlefield, while over his head in a symbolic procession file an array of the dead, each carrying his wooden cross.
It is, more than anything, simply a series of episodes, but linked by the common themes of loyalty, courage, suffering and death. Certain fragments stand out as unforgettable. There is Gilbert Demachy, visiting the grave of a comrade to scatter over it the fragments of a letter which came too late. There is the death of Corporal Breval—a simple, brave soldier who had gone out near the enemy's lines to seek water for his squad and had been shot down. There is the parade of the survivors—one of the most thrilling and heart-throbbing scenes the moving pictures have given us.
There is, above all, the attack—a stupendous technical tour de force, faithful to the smallest details. It is this fidelity which is the outstanding achievement of the film. The authors sought only to give us the reality in all its horrors, its crudities, its agonies and its greatness. The dialogue is taken directly from the book and consists chiefly of biting sallies, grim jokes, slang phrases—all the restrained emotion of men living at the breaking point, afraid to give way to their feelings, but seeing with bitter humor the irony of their situation. There is an exaltation about the grim jesting in the face of tragedy which gives a curious touch of nobility to what they say.
The coarseness, the blasphemy even, upon which men fall back in times like those, is but a camouflage for emotions which must not be expressed lest they make men lose their courage. This quality, which Dorgelès expressed so beautifully in his book, is expertly caught for the screen.
The Lesson. Inevitably, in the wealth of discussion the picture has already aroused, the question cropped up as to whether "Les Croix de Bois" was an argument for or against war. Certainly, the producers, the director and the author of the book meant it to be against. So much so, in fact, that the first showing of it was in Geneva for the delegates to the Disarmament Conference. However, the next was here in Paris for the veterans of the Thirty-ninth Infantry. Then the press saw it, and finally it was opened to the public at a gala performance which the President of France attended. In each case—particularly the press comments—the horror and anguish and tragedy of the subject were stressed.
The picture itself consciously points no moral at all. It simply presents war as it was, and the audience writes its own moral. The key, then, lies with the spectators and their reactions. Your correspondent attended the press showing, and there, at least, the feeling was unmistakable. The applause for the dying Corporal Breval was a tribute to fine acting, but that for Demachy standing beside the grave of his comrade was a tribute to the fallen soldier, as well as to the beauty and pathos of the scene. And the waves upon waves of applause which punctuated the various attack scenes were the result of sheer exultation, which reached a tremendous climax in the marvelous parade of the survivors.
Heroes of the Past. After all, these people were saying to themselves, consciously or unconsciously, men were giants in those days. The high courage, the unselfishness, the uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, the sacrifice of life for ideals they thought true—these were great qualities. This particular audience must have been thinking: These men we see here were Frenchmen, our own flesh and blood. And what about the veterans, of whom there must have been hundreds in the audience? Could any of them have failed to think that just to march once more in such a parade of the survivors they would not go through again the inferno of those days? So, it would be hard to say that "Les Croix de Bois" is the perfect argument for peace—which is just as well. A work of art need not point a moral. Raymond Bernard has produced a great picture, and nothing else matters.
This article looks at the war through the movie and through the novel the movie was based on.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ifr/article/view/7686/8743
"This essay will examine two important combat novels usually regarded as pacifist or antiwar novels, and the films based on them: first, Roland Dorgelès's testimonial Les Croix de bois (1919) and Raymond Bernard's 1932 film of it; and second, Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) and Lewis Milestone's 1930 American film version of it, All Quiet on the Western Front. The transformation of novelistic fictions into film fictions and the popular, critical, and even official reception of these works reveal patterns of national thought between the wars - patterns which have left their legacy in our use of political terminology to describe cultural artifacts and movements."