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We'll take that up after the war
I like movies I can't classify. Frank Borzage's No Greater Glory (1934) is one: a film about children that isn't a children's movie, a war story set firmly during peacetime, an allegory where every symbolic gesture of stolen flags and returned marbles and formally presented officer's caps is balanced by a perfectly concrete sneeze or banana or inopportune frog. It's about as subtle as a neon brick, but much more beautiful to look at. It's a bit devastating.
Adapted by Jo Swerling from Ferenc Molnár's classic youth novel The Paul Street Boys (A Pál utcai fiúk, 1906), the pre-Code film wastes no time establishing its anti-war bona fides as its woodcut-style title cards of caissons and mourning crosses give way to a montage of no-man's-land explosions and barbed-wire bayonet charges culminating in a wounded, shell-shocked soldier in a makeshift field hospital screaming that "this war—any war at all—is a foul and rotten thing—and patriotism is a loathsome lie!" Yet less than a generation later, he's a hawkish schoolmaster exhorting his students with the same fervent fist-shaking gesture that patriotism is the finest thing in the world, that there is "nothing nobler than war in defense of the country we love." The boys barely hear him, having already internalized the lesson to the point that school is marking time while they wait to get back to the real business of their young adolescent lives, defending their home ground of the vacant lot in the lumberyard on Paul Street from all comers, especially the older, tougher gang of the Red Shirts who already hold the well-patrolled territory of the botanical gardens. Their teacher dismisses their war games as juvenile delinquency, missing the miniature mirror of his own rhetoric as the smallest, most ill-suited, and most dreamily gung-ho of the Paul Street Boys, the knock-kneed, blond-mopped Nemecsek (George Breakston), declares with trembling intensity, "We love it! And we swear to be free forever and protect it with our lives!" He means every word and he doesn't know what they mean and he'll prove it before the tragic end of the movie, the last shot of his fingers tangled in the frayed threads of a hand-stitched flag as poetically ironic as the idea of a war to end all wars. The janitor of the lumberyard shakes his head in amusement at the kids with their non-lethal imitations of artillery and trenches scuffling furiously in the dust: "So much fighting—and all over an empty lot!" The old watchman with his pinned sleeve and his medal shakes his head much more sadly: "It ain't an empty lot. It's Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, Manchuria. It's any war—every war—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It's always the same."
That's the plot; I said it wasn't subtle. The paramilitary rituals of the Paul Street Boys and the Red Shirts aren't a sign of societal breakdown à la Lord of the Flies; they are the rules of society reified at pint-size and enacted with a terrible innocence that they don't yet understand their elders discarded in the real war. Led respectively by the stolid Boka (Jimmy Butler) and the sinewy Feri Áts (a magnificent Frankie Darro), they're playing at chivalry in the streets of a city whose empire broke up in gas attacks and friendly fire, holding themselves to standards that died with machine-gunned cavalry. Nemecsek unsuccessfully sneaking into the botanical gardens is deemed "too small to beat up" and given a ducking instead, but also a full salute from his respectful enemies as he trudges damply, fatefully home. Feri Áts may take advantage of a resentful also-ran among the Paul Street Boys in order to steal their flag as it flies atop the lumber stacks, but he rejects as dishonorable the plan of taking the yard itself by similar treachery. Instead a war is scheduled as nicely as a Christmas truce, with successive delegations negotiating via white flag a start time of "three o'clock sharp" and combat rules of "sand bombs, wrestling, and fencing with spears—you're familiar with the regulations?" Boka double-checks with touching scrupulousness. When the turncoat Geréb (Jackie Searl) returns remorsefully to the yard, it is understood that he must redeem himself in battle, requesting the most dangerous placement as if he's really in danger of losing his life, not just getting his deceptively cute face roughed up. Again and again, Nemecsek with his clumsiness and his crying and his unauthorized habit of whistling to express enthusiasm tries to prove himself worthy of a commission—he's the only private in an army of officers, a distinction shared dubiously with the watchman's dog—and it isn't until far too late that he's recognized by his comrades not just as their misfit mascot but the biggest-hearted of the Paul Street Boys, much good it does him. What's complex is the film's recognition that there's real tenacity in his actions, real courage even or especially when he's facing down childhood fears. Dripping wet and weeping, taunted by Geréb in a lantern-lit circle of armed Red Shirts, Nemecsek stands his ground:
"I'll bet I feel better than you do. I'd rather stay in the water till New Year's than do what you did. If you gave me another ducking or threw me in the water a hundred times or a thousand times, I'll still come back for that flag . . . I'm not afraid of any one of you, and if you're coming to Paul Street to take our lot away, we'll be right there waiting for you, and don't forget it, either. I'd rather be drowned or have my brains knocked out than be a traitor like—like—"
It's just not possible to appreciate the bravery, the loyalty, or the ingenuity of any of these children without finding their heel-clicking, bugle-calling, banner-waving applications an absurd waste. Gentrification will render the winning or losing of Paul Street as ultimately irrelevant as the apocalypse of World War I which set the stage for World War II which incidentally appears to have done nothing to prevent the wheels of nationalism from grinding us all into pulp again. Like so many movies of the '30's in hindsight, No Greater Glory is accidentally, doubly shadowed not just by the war its audiences were intended to remember, but the one they couldn't know for certain was coming. They play at soldiers now, but in a few years these kids will be wearing uniforms in earnest. (Or they'll have emigrated or get lined up on the banks of the Danube; I don't know enough about Hungarian names to guess whether any of the characters are Jewish. Molnár was; so was Swerling. Borzage was Catholic and knew the value of a good pietà. The future is the future, but I don't want to imagine even spiteful little Geréb wearing the Arrow Cross.) It is also difficult for me to tell if No Greater Glory really is as youthfully homoerotic as it looks to me, with Nemecsek eating his heart out for a glance from the oblivious Boka while the appreciation of the formidable Feri Áts passes him by, or if it's just a side effect of Borzage's all-embracing romanticism, amplified by Joseph H. August's luminous cinematography that shoots everyone as eloquently as a silent film. And of course, despite its scene-setting names and the occasional rear projection of Budapest, I have no idea whether the film is a faithful representation of the novel whose publication predates by almost a decade the war it's here so crucially set after, although the fact that it was an international best-seller means I should have little trouble tracking down a copy to find out. It's just so unusual to find a movie that could pair equally with Talk About a Stranger (1952) or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), even in Borzage's weird filmography it gets my attention. I have overlooked Ralph Morgan and Lois Wilson as Nemecsek's parents, but they're just as heartbreaking as their son. This victory brought to you by my delicate backers at Patreon.
Adapted by Jo Swerling from Ferenc Molnár's classic youth novel The Paul Street Boys (A Pál utcai fiúk, 1906), the pre-Code film wastes no time establishing its anti-war bona fides as its woodcut-style title cards of caissons and mourning crosses give way to a montage of no-man's-land explosions and barbed-wire bayonet charges culminating in a wounded, shell-shocked soldier in a makeshift field hospital screaming that "this war—any war at all—is a foul and rotten thing—and patriotism is a loathsome lie!" Yet less than a generation later, he's a hawkish schoolmaster exhorting his students with the same fervent fist-shaking gesture that patriotism is the finest thing in the world, that there is "nothing nobler than war in defense of the country we love." The boys barely hear him, having already internalized the lesson to the point that school is marking time while they wait to get back to the real business of their young adolescent lives, defending their home ground of the vacant lot in the lumberyard on Paul Street from all comers, especially the older, tougher gang of the Red Shirts who already hold the well-patrolled territory of the botanical gardens. Their teacher dismisses their war games as juvenile delinquency, missing the miniature mirror of his own rhetoric as the smallest, most ill-suited, and most dreamily gung-ho of the Paul Street Boys, the knock-kneed, blond-mopped Nemecsek (George Breakston), declares with trembling intensity, "We love it! And we swear to be free forever and protect it with our lives!" He means every word and he doesn't know what they mean and he'll prove it before the tragic end of the movie, the last shot of his fingers tangled in the frayed threads of a hand-stitched flag as poetically ironic as the idea of a war to end all wars. The janitor of the lumberyard shakes his head in amusement at the kids with their non-lethal imitations of artillery and trenches scuffling furiously in the dust: "So much fighting—and all over an empty lot!" The old watchman with his pinned sleeve and his medal shakes his head much more sadly: "It ain't an empty lot. It's Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, Manchuria. It's any war—every war—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It's always the same."
That's the plot; I said it wasn't subtle. The paramilitary rituals of the Paul Street Boys and the Red Shirts aren't a sign of societal breakdown à la Lord of the Flies; they are the rules of society reified at pint-size and enacted with a terrible innocence that they don't yet understand their elders discarded in the real war. Led respectively by the stolid Boka (Jimmy Butler) and the sinewy Feri Áts (a magnificent Frankie Darro), they're playing at chivalry in the streets of a city whose empire broke up in gas attacks and friendly fire, holding themselves to standards that died with machine-gunned cavalry. Nemecsek unsuccessfully sneaking into the botanical gardens is deemed "too small to beat up" and given a ducking instead, but also a full salute from his respectful enemies as he trudges damply, fatefully home. Feri Áts may take advantage of a resentful also-ran among the Paul Street Boys in order to steal their flag as it flies atop the lumber stacks, but he rejects as dishonorable the plan of taking the yard itself by similar treachery. Instead a war is scheduled as nicely as a Christmas truce, with successive delegations negotiating via white flag a start time of "three o'clock sharp" and combat rules of "sand bombs, wrestling, and fencing with spears—you're familiar with the regulations?" Boka double-checks with touching scrupulousness. When the turncoat Geréb (Jackie Searl) returns remorsefully to the yard, it is understood that he must redeem himself in battle, requesting the most dangerous placement as if he's really in danger of losing his life, not just getting his deceptively cute face roughed up. Again and again, Nemecsek with his clumsiness and his crying and his unauthorized habit of whistling to express enthusiasm tries to prove himself worthy of a commission—he's the only private in an army of officers, a distinction shared dubiously with the watchman's dog—and it isn't until far too late that he's recognized by his comrades not just as their misfit mascot but the biggest-hearted of the Paul Street Boys, much good it does him. What's complex is the film's recognition that there's real tenacity in his actions, real courage even or especially when he's facing down childhood fears. Dripping wet and weeping, taunted by Geréb in a lantern-lit circle of armed Red Shirts, Nemecsek stands his ground:
"I'll bet I feel better than you do. I'd rather stay in the water till New Year's than do what you did. If you gave me another ducking or threw me in the water a hundred times or a thousand times, I'll still come back for that flag . . . I'm not afraid of any one of you, and if you're coming to Paul Street to take our lot away, we'll be right there waiting for you, and don't forget it, either. I'd rather be drowned or have my brains knocked out than be a traitor like—like—"
It's just not possible to appreciate the bravery, the loyalty, or the ingenuity of any of these children without finding their heel-clicking, bugle-calling, banner-waving applications an absurd waste. Gentrification will render the winning or losing of Paul Street as ultimately irrelevant as the apocalypse of World War I which set the stage for World War II which incidentally appears to have done nothing to prevent the wheels of nationalism from grinding us all into pulp again. Like so many movies of the '30's in hindsight, No Greater Glory is accidentally, doubly shadowed not just by the war its audiences were intended to remember, but the one they couldn't know for certain was coming. They play at soldiers now, but in a few years these kids will be wearing uniforms in earnest. (Or they'll have emigrated or get lined up on the banks of the Danube; I don't know enough about Hungarian names to guess whether any of the characters are Jewish. Molnár was; so was Swerling. Borzage was Catholic and knew the value of a good pietà. The future is the future, but I don't want to imagine even spiteful little Geréb wearing the Arrow Cross.) It is also difficult for me to tell if No Greater Glory really is as youthfully homoerotic as it looks to me, with Nemecsek eating his heart out for a glance from the oblivious Boka while the appreciation of the formidable Feri Áts passes him by, or if it's just a side effect of Borzage's all-embracing romanticism, amplified by Joseph H. August's luminous cinematography that shoots everyone as eloquently as a silent film. And of course, despite its scene-setting names and the occasional rear projection of Budapest, I have no idea whether the film is a faithful representation of the novel whose publication predates by almost a decade the war it's here so crucially set after, although the fact that it was an international best-seller means I should have little trouble tracking down a copy to find out. It's just so unusual to find a movie that could pair equally with Talk About a Stranger (1952) or The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), even in Borzage's weird filmography it gets my attention. I have overlooked Ralph Morgan and Lois Wilson as Nemecsek's parents, but they're just as heartbreaking as their son. This victory brought to you by my delicate backers at Patreon.
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You are welcome. Please feel free to introduce it to others.
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...oh no.
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There are some things it's just not safe to promise.
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We have discussed the Archers occasionally!
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Actually, a neon brick sounds kind of lovely--though I fully believe the film is even more so.
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Did you talk to me—or write about—The Wind Rises? I remember when
I guess because it (or really: your review) makes me think about what the purpose of art is (okay, there are multiple-multiple purposes) and what it says and does, apart from its purpose(s). And also, it makes me think about how there are fundamentals of life and human nature that we don't seem to get beyond.
That's a reasonable thing to feel complicated about. One of the many, many movies I haven't written about is something from 1925 that startled me the other night with its immediate modern relevance, which was at once fascinating and sort of depressing, since in nearly a century you would have thought some problems might have been solved.
Actually, a neon brick sounds kind of lovely--though I fully believe the film is even more so.
To be honest, now that I've come up with the image, I think it might be an excellent surrealist art object.
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Thank you! I missed that somehow.
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That was in my head after the movie, too. I just got more stuck with "Army Dreamers," and therefore it wound up the relevant music for this post (and, two days later, still stuck in my head).
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