I suspect that it’s difficult for a contemporary audience to get as much out of these WWI movies as they should, since we know now what they couldn’t have known then. The whole societal attitude towards war is so different — so much more about honor and class — and the dislocation that comes through so clearly in “modernist” writing (i.e. Ford Madox Ford and Hemingway) doesn’t come across as clearly in film. To me, anyway. It’s a good movie to watch in terms of seeing who’s borrowed from it over the years, but as a story, it dragged a bit and didn’t have a clear climax, although perhaps that’s the intent. I really enjoyed reading about the saga of the negative print, though. Apparently, for many years scholars assumed the Nazis had destroyed it, and what you used to see when the movie ran late at night is the edited print that Renoir put together after the war. Eventually, the negative turned up in a Russian archive, and the quality is far superior.

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