The plot of the 1959 German film, The Bridge, is pivoted on this:  “In the very last days of World War II a group of seven German high-school friends are hastily impressed into the army” (Stanley Kauffmann).  A country in trouble, perhaps, is willing to recruit its sixteen-year-old boys, and although the boys here are meant to be relatively safe, they are not.

What comes about is not only the usual fog of war but also the savage folly of war—of a war conducted by a country, Germany, whose ideals have been hijacked by scoundrels.  (So claims the boys’ teacher.)  Domestic drama in the boys’ lives is eclipsed by battlefield horrors.

Directed by Bernhard Wicki, The Bridge is authentically anti-war, a famous old Euro-artwork still vivid and meaningful.

(In German with English subtitles)

As France’s Eric Rohmer got older, his films got better.  Pauline at the Beach (1982) is a minor case in point.  Herein, a 40ish Lothario and an obtuse young man unable to win back an ex-girlfriend make a mess of things in their small-scale world.  In her own way, so does lovely Marion (Arielle Dombasle), the cousin of 15-year-old Pauline (Amanda Langlet), who receives the brunt of it all.  The attitudes of the adult characters dismay, although I’m afraid Pauline Kael was right that Rohmer “can’t resist setting up the little girl [i.e. Pauline] as our moral instructor.”

All the same, the film is likable and crisp and less boring than such Rohmer pictures as My Night at Maud’s.  As always with Rohmer, there is much conversation, but an advantage exists in revealing things through conversation rather than sound bites.  And even on DVD Nestor Almendros’s summer-season cinematography looks great.

Cover of Pauline at the Beach

(In French with English subtitles.)

In Black Angel, from 1946, there is a veneer of pulp entertainment hiding a chunk of despair.  As in The Blue Dahlia, a naughty woman is murdered, albeit here a betrayed wife (June Vincent) strives for the exoneration of the luckless husband who did not do it.  Dan Duryea is persuasive as an alcoholic Mr. Ordinary who joins and falls for the Vincent character.  Circumstance and Time, in that order, start leaving people rattled.  That justice gets done hardly gives rise to bright conciliation.

Adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel, fruitfully directed by Roy William Neill, Black Angel has no wonderful climax—and is nearly too simple—but is still provocative and agreeable.  I like a movie where a woman (Vincent) asserts herself against a man (who means her no harm) in a normal manner and is then necessarily sympathetic to him.  It’s smarter than what we get from today’s movies.

The short (and silent) Buster Keaton flick, One Week (1920), revolves around Buster and his bride (Sybil Seely) building their first house from a do-it-yourself kit, saddled by a sabotage effort from an obnoxious old flame.  Keaton’s comedies are not only funny, they’re adventurous, for Keaton is so often on the precipice, life and limb almost lost.  Through it all, the wife he loves is at his side—and she loves him—and both of them summon delectable mirth.

Also from 1920, Convict 13 is not as good but still pleasurable—weirdly so.  For a long time I thought the 21-minute lark contained too much coarse criminal violence, but—well—it doesn’t.  The ending proves it.  Again Keaton has vigor to spare, and Seely’s in this one too, though with less personality.

Jonathan and Sandy, the two most significant figures in Carnal Knowledge (1971), enter some decidedly sexual but, by and by, dismaying and all too pedestrian relationships with women, primarily Susan and Bobbie, the account of which begins with their college days and ends in the 1970s when both men are in their forties.  Susan, acted by Candice Bergen, hooks up with Sandy (Art Garfunkel) but cannot or does not resist the temptation of sleeping with Jack Nicholson’s Jonathan (Sandy’s best friend).  A later marriage between Susan and Sandy turns unhappy, and Sandy starts cheating on Susan with another woman.  For his part, Jonathan meets the toothsome, buxom, fun-loving but neither stupid nor unkind Bobbie (Ann-Margret), she who can call Jonathan an obscene name for his reluctance to shack up with her—he’d rather just visit and copulate, thank you—but who also, finally, abjectly pleads with him to make her his wife.  Jonathan will have none of it until Bobbie tries to pack it in; then, ashamed, he marries her.  Later there is a divorce.

At forty, Jonathan has become a prosperous but misogynistic boor who regularly meets with a literate, well-to-do prostitute from whom he hears prepared, ego-stroking words about his being a “real man.”  Such words are required for producing for the fellow an erection.  Sandy, forever sans Susan, is not much better off:  He now loveth the counterculture, talking of “vibes” with his hippie girlfriend.  “Both men are losers, pitiful or laughable” (John Simon) in this a director Mike Nichols-writer Jules Feiffer production which acridly bashes away at the sexual revolution.

Feiffer’s dialogue is a grabber:  smart, mocking, and what today would be considered politically incorrect:  “I don’t want a job, I want you!” exclaims Bobbie to the man who won’t marry her—hardly a line a feminist would prize.  She might approve of this one, though:  Jonathan thinks he knows how to be tender to a woman, which prompts Bobbie to yell, “Feeling me up in public is not affection!” . . .

Cover of Carnal Knowledge