1917

Directors like to show off with long takes, as long as possible. The most extreme example in classics is Hitchcock’s Rope, which takes place in real time. Cameras in those days could only hold so much film, so Hitch had to use a few little tricks which are easy to spot. Much later was Russian Ark, a lovely 96-minute film which was a tour of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, taken in one continuous Steadicam shot with hundreds of extras in period costume. There are other famous long takes, such as the opening tracking shot from Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. One of my favorites is in Robert Altman’s The Player, where two of the characters in the opening long, long take are discussing other long, long takes, including Touch of Evil. A chuckle for cinema buffs, like me.

The story here is two doughboys (or whatever the Brits called grunts down in the trenches) who are picked to carry an urgent message across enemy lines. The message is “Call it off!” A division is ready to go over the top and into withering machine gun fire (a tactic used endlessly, and uselessly, throughout this insane conflict) but the Huns are waiting for them and will chew them to pieces. So off they go, through the nightmare landscapes of deep craters filled with rotting corpses, into the abandoned German trenches, and ever further onward.

This movie is two takes. It could have been one, but the first part is in the early evening, and the director wanted to have the last part be in the darkness and early morning. That would have taken too much time, so the surviving soldier (one of them dies about a third of the way through, and not the one I expected) is shot at by a sniper and falls down a stairway, knocking himself out. When he wakes up it is dark, and he soldiers on.

It’s a stunning technical achievement. Some of the cuts can be seen, as when they go from the trenches into a dugout and the screen is dark for a moment, but these days they can seamlessly stitch two scenes together in the computer, so you have no idea where one take ended and another began.

The production is awesome. There are hundreds of extras in the trenches, and the camera is almost always on the move. The British trenches are horrible places, seas of mud and misery. When they get to the German lines they are amazed to see concrete linings and underground barracks with actual bunk beds. Then on to the second British line, which is dug into chalk. It is all blinding whiteness.

There are no big star names, except for short appearances by Colin Firth at the beginning and Benedict Cumberbatch at the end. The shoot must have been grueling for all involved. This was nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture (it lost to Parasite, a bad decision in my opinion) and won three technical awards. I will remember this one for a long time.