Ninety years ago this month, the battles of Vimy and Paschendale were being fought on the battlefields of France.
Freeze frame.
No doubt at this point, you are expecting a revisionist take on Lewis Milestone's All Quiet One The Western Front or Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.
Sorry. You'll have to try another Classic Film column for that.
That's because for me, the film that best typifies the daily drudgery of that near-one hundred year old conflict is one far less expensive, sophisticated, or dramatic.
Nevertheless, it brings the home the deprivation, the fear, and the transcendent moments of camaraderie among the men who endured that long and ugly battle better than any other movie...
Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms.
Shoulder Arms was produced during the heart of the conflict, 1918. Thus, there's no arguing which film on the First World War boasts the most authentic look, as Chaplin had a living, breathing model from which to work.
With Shoulder Arms, Chaplin set out to capture the character of the archetypical soldier in toto: his loneliness, his fear, his hopes and his small pleasures, all in the trademark persona of his Little Tramp.
He instantly recognized that this character represented something grander, namely, the overwhelmed, undersized and ill-prepared in every man.
Chaplin had an inherent understanding and sympathy for what the fighting men had to go through. And unlike other comic filmmakers dealing with war - Ernst Lubitsch, for example, with his To Be or Not To Be - he was not out to lampoon wartime conventions as an act of trivialization, looking to diminish their status and make them easier hurdles over which the hero could triumph. Rather, he was out to exaggerate them in order to make them more real, thus creating a greater sympathy for his lead character and, subversively, the real men enduring the misery of the trenches.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Chaplin's choice of ending: after being riled from his cot to take part in a special mission, by which he accidentally captures the Kaiser, Charlie is hailed as a hero. He and a group of fellow soldiers pose proudly for camera, and a title card announces, "Peace to all!"...then, Charlie is roused from his dream, and finds himself re-immersed in the reality of pending battle.
None of the service comedies that followed in this one's wake, for Soldier Arms is the grand daddy of the genre, ever bothered with that final return to the real, that acknowledgement of just how truly unromantic is war.
Even Chaplin himself, in his later The Great Dictator, forewent it, settling instead for a final, St-Crispian's Day-style rallying cry aimed, some said, at getting America involved in what was then a strictly European conflict.
War is hell, and the First World War was the most hellish. Chaplin, through comedy of all things, managed to translate that message to film better than any other filmmaker then or now.
