The Bridge

Apparently, screenplay wisdom posits that seven is the greatest number of consequential characters that an audience can manage in the course of a feature film.  We know this from Kurosawa's original Seven Samurai and its numerous iterations in American films.  This point is verified by Bernhard Wicki's 1958 The Bridge, a morose war film that documents the final days of Germany's Volksturm in WWII.  In the Volksturm, old men and boys were conscripted to defend the German homeland increasingly overrun with invaders.   The results, of course, were catastrophic for all involved.  In The Bridge, seven high school boys, all between 15 and 16 years old, find themselves abandoned to defend a river crossing in their rural home town.  The Americans are advancing in overwhelming force and the bridge is meaningless -- the invaders have already crossed the river at other points -- and, in fact, isscheduled for demolition.   But no one has told the kids manning barricades at the span.  American tanks advance and there is a desperate skirmish in which all but one of the boys are killed.  The film's closing title tells us that the massacre occurred on April 27, 1945 in an action "too inconsequential to be reported in any official dispatch." German viewers would know that Hitler killed himself on April  30, 1945 and that the war was over a few hours later -- accordingly, the death of the principal characters in the film is utterly meaningless, a final spasm of pointless violence in a war that is already, more or less, over.

Wicki's film was highly regarded when released, but has been superseded, of course, by more showy and spectacular combat pictures.  Until Criterion's release of The Bridge last year, the film was very hard to see.  It has never really been revived in the United States and, in fact, from an ideological perspective, is a picture that is not supposed to exist.  Each generation develops its own mythology and during the last forty years or so, there has been a legend to the effect that the Germans never came to terms with WWII, that the German people passed from rabid support of the war effort through total denial into an amnesia that is supposed to have lasted until Sebald's chronicle of the air war in On The Natural History of Destruction (1999) and books like Grass' memoir Peeling the Onion with his novel Crabwalk -- all works originating in the late 1990's.  Although there is, perhaps, a kernel of truth to this mythology, Wicki's film refutes this narrative -- the movie is an uncompromising examination of the pathology of the Volksturm and, certainly, not amnesiac in any way.

Like most war films, the picture divides into two parts:  the inexorable lead-up to the battle and the battle itself.  A plane has just dropped a bomb near a single-lane concrete span over a river.  The bridge is nondescript and provides access to an equally nondescript German town.  We see some church spires on the horizon and some ugly utilitarian buildings -- the town seems mostly deserted.  Those who can afford to flee have fled and the men are all fighting in the war.  A woman delivers milk from a  horse-drawn wagon.  A group of boys plays hooky to see the bomb crater by the bridge.  There's a scene in which a class of eight students (the boys who will be killed and a girl) translate English poetry.  The boys have built a tree fort next to the bridge, a nice touch that isn't over-emphasized but that provides a subtle leit motif as the film proceeds.  There's some underplayed rather enigmatic melodrama -- Karl's father, a wounded war veteran, is sleeping with Barbara, a middle-aged lady. (This distresses Karl who is loyal to his mother who seems to be dead.)  Walter, who likes jazz (his father calls it "nigger music") is angry at his father for seducing the servant girl.  When Walter rages at his father and, then, shouts at the girl, shoving her against the wall, she replies blithely "Your father was much gentler."  Walter's mother has been evacuated from the town that is now near the front.  Many of the people in town seem to be displaced persons.  the kindly Frau Mutz is caring for a boy who has lost his family, Hans.  Hans is older than the small and rather sickly looking Albert and Frau Mutz begs Hans to watch over her boy.  Juergen's mother is the milk lady, a woman is said "to never lose her composure."  Sigi raises rabbit named Alberich and Wotan..  Klaus has a girlfriend to whom he gives a watch with radium-illumined dial -- later, rather practically, Klaus asks for the watch back so that he can use it for "night patrols" now that he has been conscripted.  Klaus and Walter get into a fist fight over a cynical remark that Walter (angry about his dad's girlfriend)  makes about the local girls.  The Nazi party leader bellows at everyone while making certain that his own family is duly evacuated.  When the boys are conscripted, their teacher (excused from service due to a heart condition) goes to see the military commander in town and asks that the boys be sent to the rear.  The military commander, an old soldier, denounces the teacher as weak and defeatist.  But, later, we see that he pulls strings to get the seven boys assigned to duty guarding the bridge in town -- this is supposed to keep them away from combat at the front lines.  The boys, upon being conscripted, are enthusiastic recruits -- but their basic training lasts all of one day and consists of being run in circles in the garrison courtyard.  An old soldier notes that the drill sergeant keeps ordering them to "retreat" -- "They'll learn that soon enough on their own," he says.

Just before dawn, the seven boys are stationed at the bridge.  Before deployment, the commander gives the assembled troops (probably about 250 old men and boys) a hair-raising harangue telling them that they must be prepared to die for every square-foot of the homeland.  Kampf, Sieg, oder Tod, they are told:  "Battle, victory or death!" -- these are the only options.  But it's all tough talk that no one believes except the little boys.  The German troops are in headlong retreat from the front and the bridge has been slotted for demolition -- the Americans have crossed at other points and there is literally no strategic importance to the bridge.  The idea is to allow the boys a camp-out at the barricade at the bridge and, then, to withdraw them away from the Front.  But the local commander, who has formed this benevolent plan, gets shots by a couple of Nazi fanatics -- he is deemed insufficiently loyal to the cause.  No one tells the boys that the bridge is strategically insignificant and should simply be abandoned.  Their leader doesn't come back when he says he is going into town to get coffee -- the fanatics have gunned him down -- and so no one tells them to stand down.  The situation is the same as that memorably depicted in Neil Young's great song "Powderfinger" -- the powers that be have left these kids "to do the thinking" and, of course, they are clueless.  Just before dawn, a big convoy of German soldiers appears and crosses the bridge going in the wrong direction.  One of the soldiers gives one of the kids some chocolate -- "you might as well enjoy the candy before they put you in a box."  A commander on motorcycle with a big Iron Cross at his throat ventures onto the bridge and runs out of gas.  The boy's are impressed by hardened soldier and, then, a bit alarmed when he and his adjutant literally run away.  Some horrific sounds are heard and they get louder and louder.  American tanks are headed toward the river crossing.  What happens next is more or less predictable which is the whole point of the movie.  The combat scenes are documentary in style and very effective.  The entire film is shot and edited like an Italian neo-realist picture.  Everything is clear, modest, and carefully thought-out to make an appalling point -- the boys are all killed for no reason at all.  The battle scenes are shot in close-up with the children cowering in their shallow trenches.  Some of them show heroism but it is meaningless.  The American infantrymen are shocked that they are killing little boys and beg the kids to surrender but they, literally, don't know how to do this.  In the end, no one wants the boys to fight.  The town commander is horrified that they are shooting at the Americans, aggression that has caused the tanks to shell the town which is full of cowering women and children.  When he comes to remonstrate with one of the boys armed with a Panzerfaust (a recoil-less anti-tank weapon), the kid fires the bazooka at close-range at an American tank and the back-blast from the weapon burns off the face of the commanding officer.  In the end, the two Nazi thugs come onto the bridge to blow it up.  In a River Kwai development, the two surviving boys aren't willing to allow the span to be destroyed.  One of them shoots the Nazi with the demolition equipment.  But he's not careful about how he fires his weapon and the bullet goes right through the thug and kills his comrade.  And, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse Five: "So it goes."

The movie is excellent although it makes its points with a sledgehammer.  The boys are insufficiently characterized and really just cannon fodder -- there's a moving scene when the boy who punched Walter now cradles him in his arms on the bridge.  Blood is pouring from Walter's nose once more but this time he is fatally wounded.  Sometimes, I guess, a sledgehammer is necessary.