Saturday, September 28, 2019
No Greater Glory (1934)
Supposedly anti-war, but made it look fun. There was at least one Little Rascals short that seemed to be inspired by this. Based on the Hungarian novel A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) about some sixth graders who fight a war with the junior high kids over what they keep calling a vacant lot although it's apparently used to store lumber. It seems like an extremely dangerous place for them to be using as a playground. Why don't they play in the railroad yard instead? According to Wikipedia, it's a popular young adult novel in Israel (at least among Jewish kids) which is pretty good reason to doubt it's really anti-war.
Like that West German movie, The Bridge, the first supposedly anti-war West German movie made after World War Two. It took the capitalist German movie industry until 1959 to decide that World War Two was bad. It could just as easily been considered pro-war except that some of the Nazis blub during the fighting. I've seen explicitly pro-war movies made during the war that were intended to spur enlistment that made it look far worse.
It's available on The Criterion Channel.
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