Edith, a young French woman, is in love with a poet but is forced by her father into a marriage with a much older man. Edith is captured by the Germans and endures multiple rapes that result in her becoming pregnant. Edith’s husband initially thinks that the poet is the father of her child, and the story ends in tragedy with both men seeing action in the trenches.Read More »
Based on the true story of a band of gypsies in occupied Poland during World War II and their struggle againt the Nazi invaders. Half a million gypsies died as they fled in a vain attempt to escape. The film follows the story of Dymitr, a Polish gypsy violinist, as he tries to lead his family and friends to safety in Hungary. A tragic and moving film with a wonderful authentic soundtrack of Gypsy music.Read More »
One of the worst of many inhuman aspects of World War II were the “penalty” battalions in the German army, dramatized in this excellent film about several men serving in these units. Director Harald Phillipp spares no ounce of realism in first relating what kinds of men are conscripted, and then how they are treated. One man’s crime was not returning to his unit on time, another did not follow unscrupulous orders, yet another supposedly mutilated himself in order to escape the draft. Once in a penalty battalion, the assignments and the superior officers are brutal. The men are sent to the most dangerous battle fronts, they are asked to de-mine without equipment, and no one balks at leaving them without weapons if a hasty retreat is in order. Sobering and well-photographed, the men’s stories are engrossing from beginning to end.
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The war exploits of French captain Conan and his men during World War I and during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.Read More »
Fuller admitted that he was obsessed by war and that he wouldn’t have made war movies unless he’d seen combat (he did, with distinction). This movie plays like a gutsy draft of his cherished project, The Big Red One, and looks as if it could have influenced Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (compare the steady destruction of the entrenched Japanese as the men advance on them). Merrill’s men are in Burma on a pitiless mission that we are dragged into emotionally, then almost physically, by Fuller’s up-front direction, as we gradually realize its suicidal nature.Read More »
Quote:
The British Film Institute has been unable to locate a print of the film for inclusion in the BFI National Archive, and classes it as “missing, believed lost”. There is increasing interest by film historians in Gréville’s directorial career, with the same year’s Noose being particularly highly regarded. The current absence of But Not in Vain represents a crucial gap in Gréville’s filmography, and the BFI lists the film as one of its “75 Most Wanted” missing British feature films.Read More »
Yugoslav partisans grimly crop the hair of a village quintet of women believed to have consorted with the occupational Nazis. Four, for various reasons, have indeed – and their seducer is a lone, swaggering sergeant whom the partisans briskly emasculate. Escorted out of town by the sheepish Nazis, the forlorn ladies link up, patriotically and romantically, with a band of tough mountain guerrillasRead More »
Plot:
In the conflict with the enemy in a already lost battle, at risk to die in vain, partisan Mitko Angelov, is leaving the battlefield. He boards on the train and goes to see his mother, who has just returned from internment. When he returned to the brigade, he was declared a deserter, disarmed and bound. Since he lost his weapon, the Commissioner sent him to patrol in action, to take a weapon from Germans. All partisans from the patrol were killed except Mitko and Vane, who was seriously wounded. Thinking that Vane is dead, Angelov returns was in the brigade. But the commander did not believe him, thinking that he had fled from the battle, and imprisons him in the basement. In the meantime, a wounded fighter Vane is showing up, and the story of the heroic struggle. But at the same time, a military court sentenced him to death for desertion.Read More »
Synopsis :
After settling his differences with a Japanese PoW camp commander, a British colonel co-operates to oversee his men’s construction of a railway bridge for their captors – while oblivious to a plan by the Allies to destroy it. (imdb)Read More »