The film’s collective protagonist is a group of seven German schoolboys, all age 16, who are drafted in the last weeks of April 1945, when Germany’s defeat was all but assured and Hitler’s regime was desperately putting any able body, young or old, on the front lines. For these boys, all of their formative years, from middle childhood into adolescence, were spend in the Third Reich, where fervid nationalism and commitment to Hitler were indoctrinated to the point that they truly believed that defending a square foot of German soil—no matter how uselessly—was the equivalent of defending Germany itself. Thus, when they receive their draft notices, it is an exciting moment of confirmation that they, too, will get to serve the Fatherland. The first half of the film depicts them in their everyday lives, and there are small subplots involving one boy’s shy flirtation with the only girl in their class, their collective discovery of a cache of stolen liquor hidden on the banks of the river, and another boy’s disillusionment when he discovers that his father is having an affair with the secretary on whom the boy has a crush. These are just fragments of experience that add up to the notion of youth and naiveté, underscoring the idea that calling these boys to arms is nothing short of heinous.

Yet, called they are, and with only a day of training by older, weary officers who don’t believe anymore, they are to be sent to the frontlines. However, their teacher, a pacifist who was spared military duty due to a heart condition, appeals to their company commander to keep them out of battle, which he does by stationing them on the small stone bridge in their hometown. It is meant to be a safe assignment, but when their commanding officer is inadvertently killed, the boys take it upon themselves to defend the bridge against the advancing American troops, even though the plan for the German military is to blow it up. Thus, these seven schoolboys, steeped in militaristic propaganda and determined to prove both their personal mettle and their devotion to country, initiate a bloody confrontation that ultimately serves no purpose. The bridge, which only days earlier had been a place to play and flirt and talk, becomes a gratuitous battleground that literally and symbolically comes to stand for the futility of war fought for the wrong reasons.

The Bridge was based on an autobiographical novel by journalist Gregor Dorfmeister (writing under the name Manfred Gregor), who fictionalized his own experience as a teenage draftee at the end of the war defending two bridges very much like the one in the film. For Wicki, an actor-turned-director who had only made one film the previous year, Gregor’s novel was a “hymn to German courage” and “a memorial to his friends who had fallen in the war,” and he approached the story in quite an antithetical manner by focusing on the futility of misdirected heroism. Wicki is clearly a man of true conviction who bore plenty of scars from the Nazi era. When he was 18 he was arrested by Nazis for his leftist political activities and spent 10 months in a concentration camp, an event about which he did not speak for decades because he didn’t want to exploit or capitalize on it. Knowing that now, we can see his experience imprinted all over The Bridge, a film that bears a great deal of anger and ends with a sense of calculated despondency. Even if some of its earlier passages rely too heavily on coming-of-age clichés and stock adult characters, the film’s overall impact is undeniably powerful.

Despite being only Wicki’s second film, The Bridge made a significant impact both in Germany, where its against-the-grain antiwar stance caused some controversy (although it was given a special award at the Berlin Film Festival), and internationally, where is racked up a host of awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and an award from the United Nations for contributing to peace. Wicki modeled his aesthetic approach on Italian neorealism, which certainly informed his casting of unknown amateur actors who were still in their teenage years, although there is a strong undercurrent of German expressionism throughout the film, as well, which elevates some of its strongest scenes with an infusion of dreamlike strangeness. The violence of the battle scenes is quite intense, and Wicki relies heavily on a sense of visual realism, especially in depicting the bloody, eviscerating damage done to human bodies by bullets and grenades. Unlike many war films of the time that romanticized death on the battlefield, Wicki shows it be both gruesome and heartbreaking. The film is never so powerful as when we see these young boys finally realizing that their adolescent ideals of battlefield glory have been betrayed by the brutal realities of bullets and shrapnel.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection