Poppycock

The 11th of November is of course Remembrance Day; the day when everyone tries to out-patriotism each other by wearing little plastic poppies to honour all the glorious heroes who murdered someone else's glorious heroes because... "Freedom" or something.

My poppy is bigger than yours...

Yes, I know. That was offensive. Well you know what? War is offensive.

I have always been very uncomfortable with the commemoration of any aspect of war; even if it is just to honour the dead. It can very quickly turn into a rallying-cry for more bloodshed.


Too many times in our history has there been a tacit assumption that war is a game, with rules and ethics, and red lines that must never be crossed. That's why you will often hear pundits and politicians talking about "war crimes" and "atrocities" as if war somehow had boundaries and umpires and fouls.

Guess what? War is a crime. Any act of war is an atrocity, and if two sides can agree to work within a mutually acceptable set of rules, then they aren't fighting a war; they're just murdering each other recreationally until they all decide to go home. If that isn't an atrocity, I don't know what is.


War is never about heroism or valour or bravery, and the only true courage in warfare is the courage to not go to war at all.


Everyone is tainted by war, and memorialising our warriors risks carrying the hatred over to the next generation. One society's honoured dead are another society's mass murderers. 

And so it continues.


You may be outraged by this. I understand. It is not my intention to start a war. It will never be my intention to start a war.

But I am going to screen the unlikeliest "war" movie you may ever see.


Last month I mentioned that I had screened very few Westerns at these film nights because that was one of my least favourite film genres. (I then proceeded to screen two of them, but you have to admit, they were very atypical Westerns...)

If there is one genre I enjoy less than Westerns, it has to be War Movies. Even if a film is ostensibly anti-war, it is very difficult to dramatise a war without (at least on some level) glamorising it. This week's film is not only a very powerful anti-war film, it's an anti-war film by... Ernst Lubitsch??


A serious war drama by Lubitsch is almost as unexpected as a war drama featuring Betty Boop might be. Lubitsch is best remembered as a master of the perfectly-crafted sex comedy (he directed Trouble in Paradise, which I screened in January, as well as Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and many others). The adjective most frequently applied to his films (quite rightly) is effervescent.

He was a naughty, naughty man...

Broken Lullaby is something very different. It was released in 1932, but takes place in 1919, one year after the end of The Great War.


The war itself might have been over, but emotions were still running very hot, with waves of jingoistic hatred in both France and Germany far from settled. Phillips Holmes plays a young Frenchman who travels to Germany to meet the family of a fallen German soldier, hoping to find... peace, or perhaps simply an end to suffering.


What he sets in motion is something far more complicated.

Broken Lullaby was based on a play by Maurice Rostand (the son of Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac) and is as uncompromising an anti-war film as one could wish, despite (or in a very real sense, because of) the famed "Lubitsch touch".


Lubitsch was a master of the "comedy of manners" and many of his signature flourishes are in evidence here (notice how one scene paints a scathing portrait of an entire town using nothing but door chimes). But this is also a film about loss and guilt, long before there was a comprehensive understanding of PTSD.


Sometimes death is not the worst thing that can happen in warfare.

We will screen Broken Lullaby at 7.30 on Thursday, the 14th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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